A Moment Like Forever
by Riathe Mai
Summary: Summary: Jody isn't quite prepared when Dean arrives at her doorstep with a small child in his arms asking for her help. Neither is she prepared to learn the child is Sam. Season 9 Divergence. JodyPoV. BabySam, MaternalJody, SmartDean, gratuitous domesticity, unapologetic shmoop, cookies, hotcocoa, and snowangels Warnings for grief (canonical loss of child/spouse). COMPLETE!
1. Chapter 1

AN 1: This started out as a multi-chapter, 100-word Drabble, but my dear friend and beta Kailene insisted that it be longer. Two years and over 50 *thousand* words later... Yikes. So much thanks and appreciation to Kailene, and to my other beta and dear friend LoveThemWinchesters for all your support and encouragement.

AN 2: This story diverges from Season 8, episode 22: Clip Show simply because canon no longer worked with what I was trying to do with this story.

AN 3: WARNINGS: While it's not a primary focus, the underlying theme of this story does deal with grief over the loss of a spouse, which is something I know about first hand, and the loss of a child, which is something I (thankfully) do not. I tried to be respectful and sensitive with the subject matter, but if these themes are upsetting to you, please don't read. If you do decide to read, which I obviously hope you do, please be kind and respectful in your comments. Everyone deals with grief differently and in their own time. I have tried to stay true to Jody's amazing character as I have seen her in the show.

 **A Moment Like Forever**

 **~~~~~Chapter 1~~~~~**

 _(Friday 6:10 AM)_

He'd called her first, and as jarring as the sound of her phone ringing at 2:48 in the morning had been, the sound of Dean's voice on the other end of the line had been so much worse.

Frantic, desperate: his, _'Sheriff, I—I need your help,'_ had punched her square in the chest.

Those two never asked anyone for the kind of help she'd heard in his voice, not since Bobby had died and taken with him all rights and privileges to that level of trust. God knows she'd tried to offer, but the most those two would ever accept from her was the occasional home-cooked meal and a place to crash for the night—and then only because a snowstorm had proved far more persuasive than she.

Sure, she'd helped them on a few cases. She supposed that had to count for something. No, she knew it counted, and it had meant the world to her because she knew they didn't ask too many people for that kind of help either. They were simply too accustomed to having to rely on each other, and _only_ on each other, to think they could look anywhere else.

What she'd heard in his voice... hell, the words themselves: "I need your help." _I_ , not _we_. Only one thing could have put that tone into Dean Winchester's voice, and if he was only an _I_...

"Are you heading here or am I heading there?"

"You don't even..." he'd said, and if he'd been within swatting distance, both her hand and the back of his head would have been smarting.

 _Sweet Jesus!_ What kind of life had those two had that they didn't get that there were people out there who gave a crap about them? It didn't matter what the problem was. It would _never_ matter what the problem was. She'd made a promise to Bobby's memory that she'd look after his boys whether they wanted her to or not.

And Jody Mills didn't make promises she didn't intend to keep.

He'd been holed up in a motel about four hours away when he'd finally come to his senses to call, and the only thing that had kept her from throwing a coat over her pajamas and tear-assing out to where he was with sirens blazing had been his relieved, "We'll come to you."

 _We_ , not _I_.

So, not the end of his world, not if he was a _we_ , but still something pretty dire. It had been a long, worry-filled four hours before she'd heard the distinct rumble of the Impala pull up outside. She'd spent most of it mainlining coffee and pacing holes in her floorboards, all the while talking herself out of getting into her car and meeting him halfway. He'd told her nothing, so her mind had been busy running through all the possible scenarios that would greet her when she finally opened her door.

Not a single one had even come close to preparing her for what stood in her doorway.

Dean looked exhausted: dark circles under lack-luster eyes and several days' worth of beard over a tense jaw and grim mouth. He was alone except for the small, sleeping child he held bundled in his arms.

"I'm sorry, Sheriff," he said, and his voice sounded as wrecked as he looked.

"You should be sorry, young man," she quipped back. "How many times do I have to tell you to call me Jody?"

A muscle twitched in his unshaven jaw, but it was more tension than humor. "I'm sorry, _Jody_. I—I didn't know who else to call. I just..."

The child stirred in his arms, a mop of dark curls poking out from beneath the blanket Dean had wrapped around the small body to protect her...him—Jody couldn't tell—from the cold March air. Dean soothed the child, cupping his hand behind its head to keep its face against his chest.

"Get your ass in here, Dean Winchester."

She pushed the storm door open and he stepped past her so she could close the door behind him. She cast an uneasy glance at the Impala and its conspicuously empty passenger seat, then slowly pushed the front door closed. She leaned her back against the jamb, her hand fisted around the doorknob at the small of her back. Her heart was a lead weight in her gut.

"Dean? Where is Sam?"

Dean stood in the foyer, looking more lost than she'd ever seen him look. He glanced down at the child in his arms and the strangest expression washed over his face. She'd seen that expression before. It had been a lifetime ago, and she'd thought she'd never see it on the face of any man standing in her living room ever again. It was fierce and it was gentle with no conflict between the two. Dean smiled even as tears filled his eyes.

And she knew.

"Oh my God," she gasped.

Dean nodded. "This _is_ Sam."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

The child looked to be around three years old, with a riot of soft, sable curls framing a chubby, rosy-cheeked face. He was sound asleep on Dean's shoulder, one tiny hand fisted in the collar of Dean's flannel shirt and the other tucked into the folds of the battered, olive-green army blanket around him, so Jody couldn't see the color of his eyes. She wasn't sure why she wanted to, other than the fact that she had noticed Sam's multi-colored eyes in the past and remembered thinking how remarkable they were.

Why she was even thinking about his eyes was anybody's guess, and she shook her head. This whole situation was insane and yet, she didn't question it. Not really. She'd seen a lot of strange and inexplicable things since the first time Sam and Dean Winchester had rolled into her life. Her own son...

She shoved that thought back into its box and slammed the lid closed. She pushed herself away from the door and headed toward her living room, sweeping her hand before her to indicate that he should follow her.

"Coffee?" she asked casually, as though he'd just swung by on his way through town, as though he wasn't claiming the three-year-old in his arms was really his 31-year-old, not-so-little, little brother.

"Ah... yeah. Sure. Thanks."

She nodded and continued on her way to the kitchen. She pulled a mug out of her cupboard and filled it with coffee from the pot she'd made _after_ the pot she'd made when she'd decided there was no way she was going back to sleep. That first pot she'd drained herself.

"Did you eat?" she called out to him as she pulled open her refrigerator and scanned the shelves. She could make him an omelet if he wasn't too particular about what went in it, or scrambled eggs. There was silence from the other room. She shook her head and closed the door.

"That wasn't a trick question," she said as she carried the mug into the living room. Just as she'd thought, Dean was still standing in the middle of the room and he met her entrance with a look of such exasperation she almost laughed. She set the mug down on the coffee table then folded her hands in front of her chest defiantly. "What?"

"Did I _eat_?" he repeated incredulously.

"Dean, when you called me at 2:48 this morning..." He opened his mouth to protest, but she raised her hand in warning. "I make it a point to look at the clock when my phone wakes me up out of a dead sleep, in case I need to make a statement in court, so yes, it was exactly 2:48. You said you were about four hours away. Well, it's ten after six, which is less than four hours, by the way, so I'm guessing you didn't so much as swing through a drive-thru on your way."

She gave him a pointed look, all but daring him to try lying to her. To her surprise, he looked away first.

"No," he admitted. "It's just... I tell you my Sasquatch of a brother has been turned into a three-year-old, and..."

"And I don't want you passing out from low blood sugar before you can tell me how the hell you two get into these messes."

She left him in the living room while she put together a breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheese and ham, toast, and fruit. He'd moved over to the couch, careful not to jostle the child in his arms as he lowered himself into the cushion and reached for his coffee, and it was all she could do not to stand there and watch him.

Bobby had told her how close those two boys were, _when they weren't gettin' all up in each other's face or buttin' heads like a coupl'a jackasses._ What she'd always seen of them had spoken of something so complex that it was unlikely there was a word strong enough to describe it. It begged scrutiny, and maybe that was why they never allowed themselves to stick around in one place for too long.

Already, Dean had the look of someone who might bolt out the back door if left unsupervised for too long. There was a wildness in his eyes, lurking just beneath the exhaustion, a sense of urgency or fear or… She wasn't quite sure what it was. Every dealing she'd ever had with him, even when they'd been neck deep in it and drowning fast, he'd been cocky and irreverent and charmingly infuriating. Now, he just looked lost.

She made her way back into the living room, and stopped at the sight that greeted her. Dean was slouched on the couch, more horizontal than vertical really, his head tipped back against the back cushion. His eyes were closed and his face was slack, and yet he still held the child—Sam—in his arms in a manner that was as protective as it was comforting.

The child's eyes were open and alert above the chubby thumb he had stuffed in his mouth, yet he seemed so content to just stay there and be held, his head resting on Dean's shoulder and the index finger of his other hand twirling in a curl at the nape of his own neck.

She gave him a smile—how could she not—and he smiled back around his thumb. A deep crater formed in his cheek: those damned Sam Winchester dimples, every bit as devastating at three as they were at 30. His eyes were darker, seeming closer to the brown end of the hazel spectrum than the green, but they were Sam's eyes, watching, assessing.

A thought surfaced: was the Sam she knew still in there, a grown, strong-willed young man trapped in the body of a toddler?

She must have made a noise because Dean jerked awake, his arms tightening around Sam's body. Sam startled terribly. He made a little gasping hiccup sound and buried his face in Dean's neck. To Jody's amazement, he didn't start to cry.

"Sh—" Dean bit back whatever he'd been about to say as he sat up and rubbed the child's back. "Sorry, Tiger. It's okay. Sshhh…" He looked up at Jody. "Sorry, I… It's been a long couple a' days."

"I'll bet," she said. "You think you can drag yourself to the table? I'd rather not have to pick eggs out of my upholstery." She pointedly did not look at Sam as she said that, craning an eyebrow.

As she'd hoped, Dean smirked. "I am capable of eating with my mouth closed, ya know."

He pushed himself to his feet as if it took effort, then reached down to retrieve his empty coffee cup. Sam clung to him the whole time, his face hidden.

Seated at the table, Sam seemed as content to stay in Dean's lap while they ate as Dean seemed to have him there, occasionally taking small clumps of fluffy egg from Dean's plate with his fingers and stuffing them in his mouth. He completely ignored the small plate of eggs Jody had placed on the table for him. Finally, when it seemed Sam had had his fill of Dean's portion, Dean just dumped Sam's untouched plate onto his own and finished it off with the rest of his.

All in all, he didn't eat much, just a few bites of egg and pieces of apple. The one piece of toast Dean had offered had been met with firmly sealed lips and a sharp turn of his head. Dean hadn't pushed.

Jody hadn't pushed either. She'd eaten her own breakfast in silence, stealing serendipitous—and sometimes, blatant—glances at the two of them while they ate. The curiosity was killing her, and so as soon as she'd cleared away the empty plates and refilled their coffee mugs, she'd had enough.

"Okay, Winchester," she said as she placed a small bowl of dry Cheerios in front of Sam and sat back in her seat, "start talkin'."

Dean didn't say anything at first. He pulled a small amount of cereal out of the bowl and dropped it on the table in front of Sam, then proceeded to figure-eight one piece on the table with his finger in a gesture that seemed like an automatic and absent stalling tactic if she'd ever seen one.

"Dean." It was all she could do _not_ to grab his hand to stop the motion—and not just because Sam was watching him intently and probably was going to start playing with the cereal instead of eating it.

He looked up at her, then sat himself a little straighter in his seat and took a deep breath.

"We were on a case just outside Grand Island, Nebraska," he said softly. "Rash of disappearances. Five of them in under a month. All men in their late twenties, early thirties; healthy, athlete types." He huffed out a bitter-sounding laugh and looked down at Sam. "Yeah, I know. I'da left him in friggin' Cleveland, except…"

He shook his head. "About a week after the third disappearance, a local off-duty badge is out snowshoeing through some nature trail with his K9 when Fido starts digging in the snow and barking up a storm. Naturally, the badge called in a team.

"They found the body of a child: a boy about three years old."

His eyes flicked down to Sam—Jody still couldn't bring herself to think of the little boy quietly sliding Cheerios across her table with his fingers as _Dean's brother_ —and that same lost, frantic look crept back into his eyes. Jody couldn't blame him.

"The only mark on him was a single, shallow puncture wound in his chest over his heart," Dean continued, sounding very detached, "but according to the ME report, it wasn't what killed him. Tox screens were clean. Blood levels were normal. There were no bruises or abrasions, no internal injuries of any kind, no indication of oxygen deficiency or mal-nutrition or disease or _anything_ to warrant that kid being de—gone.

"What's more, that boy wasn't pinging anywhere on the missing children registries. Not local or national." He looked up at her and his expression made her catch her breath. "And neither are the two kids they've found since. Same M.O., same unknown C.O.D. Cops are stumped, of course. Fibby are swarming the area like ants on a Coke spill, and they don't have a clue. And of course, they don't see a connection between the five missing men and the three little John Does."

Jody felt her eyes go wide. "Wait, are you saying…?" She looked at Sam then back up at Dean.

Dean nodded. "Sammy figured it out." And, damn, the pride in his voice was tangible. "Took him all of a day to put it together, the brainiac."

The child suddenly looked up at Dean and gave him a big smile, all dimples and bright eyes and tiny, white milk teeth. Dean laughed and ruffled his hair. "Hey, Sammy. You gonna eat those or play with them?" He picked up a Cheerio and popped it into his mouth, then picked up another one and held it out to him. "Sorry, this is Sammy," he said as though reminding himself of the distinction. The child, _Sammy_ , gave him another big smile then opened his mouth wide so Dean could feed him the Cheerio.

"It confuses him," Dean explained. "He doesn't make the connection between _Sam_ and…" He made a gesture with his hand and his head that Jody interpreted to mean _Sammy_ , and she nodded.

"Anyway, _Sam_ figured out the connection between the first three missing persons and the three kids they'd found." Dean continued, as he popped another Cheerio in _Sammy's_ mouth. "We figured we were dealing with a witch of some kind, probably performing a longevity or immortality ritual. Ya know, start with a strong, healthy adult in his prime, and steal years from him by _presto-ka'zamming_ him back to the age of a toddler, then sever the link so the vic can't take 'em back.

"Problem is, with somethin' like this, it's not just the type of victim that's important. It's how many, too, and without knowing the origin of the spell…" He shrugged.

He plucked another Cheerio off the table and put it in Sammy's mouth. "Long story, short: we knew _what_ we were looking for, but we didn't know _who_ it was. We'd spoken to maybe a half dozen people, already, and we had a couple of possibles, but nothing definitive. And, for all we knew, we were running outta time. So, we changed our game plan and decided on a little B and E.

"It was plain, dumb luck. First house we checked, we found a black altar in the basement. It must have been keyed, because I was a step or two in front of Sam when it went off. There was a flash of light, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor with my ears ringing and my chest feeling like I'd been hit by a linebacker. And this little guy was out cold in a pile of Sam's clothes."

A subtle crease formed in the center of Dean's forehead, and his gaze skived off the child in his lap to fix onto the floor. "I thought he was—"

The words seemed to catch in his throat and Jody felt her own throat tighten. Her hand drifted up to her mouth and she looked down at the table while Dean marshalled back control of his expression.

"I…uhm." Dean took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. "I just grabbed him, laundry and all, and I booked." He flicked a glance at her, and she read shame in every line of his body.

She couldn't imagine what he was thinking to warrant that look. What other course of action did he think he should have taken besides grabbing his _baby brother_ and getting him the hell out of there?

"Dean," she started but he shook his head sharply.

As if he could sense the sudden tension, Sammy twisted in Dean's lap and looked up at him with an expression that was far too serious for one so young. He grabbed a fistful of Dean's shirt and yanked himself onto his feet, heedless of where he was stepping or what else might have made it into his hand. Dean winced and grunted as the less-yielding parts of that little body connected with the less-forgiving parts of his anatomy and just let Sammy squirm back into his arms.

"Easy there, Tiger," he warned, but there was no real threat behind it. Sammy made a little huff of distress, then stuffed his thumb back into his mouth and dropped his head onto Dean's shoulder.

Dean met Jody's eyes across the table as he rubbed Sammy's back. "He woke up about six hours later," he said softly, "and he didn't remember any of it. That was three days ago."

Jody didn't know what to say. She certainly hadn't included anything even remotely similar to _A witch de-aged my brother_ to that list of possible reasons for Dean to be calling her at 2:48 in the morning. Not that it would have helped her all that much if her imagination _had_ gone to such an unlikely place. She had a million questions swirling around her head—the least of which being, _how the hell_ do _these two get into these messes? Seriously!_ —but really, there was only one question that made any real difference to her at that moment.

She set her coffee mug down on the table, crossed her hands in front of her, and leaned in close. "Dean, why are you here?"

There it was again, that ready-to-take-flight mien that was telegraphed as much in his body language as it was in his expression. She certainly was no stranger to it, and she probably could have handed him a cue card with the words he was about to say printed out in big, block letters:

I'M SORRY.

I SHOULDN'T HAVE COME HERE.

THANKS FOR BREAKFAST.

I'M JUST GONNA…

"Let me save you the trouble, young man," she said firmly. "You didn't call me in the middle of the night, then drive four hours to get here just for my cooking."

Dean seemed to deflate a bit. "No, I didn't."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	2. Chapter 2

**~~~~~Chapter 2~~~~~**

( _Friday 7:00AM_ )

He pushed himself to his feet and walked back to the living room, and Jody merely got up and followed him. He wasn't bolting. He was just moving. She knew that need, all that nervous energy from having to be _on_ for too long had to go somewhere.

He stopped in the middle of the room, sighed, then looked over his shoulder just enough to give her a perfect view of his profile without revealing anything of his expression.

"There are… timeframes for stuff like this," he said. "Some spells wear off within 24 hours. Others can last a very specific number of days: three, nine, twelve, new moon to new moon, whatever. Sam could draw you a chart on a table napkin to explain what it all means." He turned away, again. "Some don't wear off. You gotta break 'em, or reverse 'em."

"And how do you do that?"

Dean chuckled. He went over to the couch and sat down, turning Sammy so he was sitting on Dean's knee. This seemed fine with Sammy, too—knowing how headstrong Sam could be, Sammy seemed a very agreeable child. Thumb firmly in place in his mouth, Sammy smiled as Dean bounced his leg a few times.

"Hey, Sammy," Dean said suddenly. "There're some puzzles in your bag."

Sammy's whole face lit up and he scurried off Dean's lap, nearly tripping over the blanket wrapped around his feet. Dean scooped him up in time to untangle him, then set him back down. Within seconds, Sammy was sitting on the floor near Dean's feet with a small stack of wooden puzzles between his outstretched legs.

Dean watched him for a few seconds, then looked back up at Jody where she'd parked herself into the armchair across from the couch.

He dropped his elbows onto his knees and leaned forward until his chin was resting in the palms of both hands, his index fingers steepled in front of his mouth. "Sometimes, it's enough to… _remove the source_ ," he said carefully. He flicked a meaningful glance at Sammy.

Jody nodded her understanding. It really didn't surprise her that he'd need to choose his words carefully while Sammy was present. Even occupied as he was with the dog puzzle in front of him, she didn't doubt for one second that he was listening to—and most likely taking in—every word they said.

"Ya know, smash the radio that's sending the signal and everything it's scrambling just goes back to normal."

"And other times?" Jody asked.

He sighed, closing his eyes. He bent his head so his face brushed through his open hands, then further, his fingers combing through his hair to interlace behind his head. He looked up, his fingers digging into the muscles at the base of his neck.

"Other times, you have to counter 'em," he continued, and she could hear a note of pain behind his words. She could only imagine how tense those muscles might be. He had to be suffering quite the headache as a result. "To do that, you gotta know how it was done in the first place."

"Which means, you may not want to go smashing that source just yet," she guessed.

He nodded. He sat up straight, wincing as he twisted his head from side to side. Jody could hear some of the bones in his neck pop with the motion. "Sometimes, the only one who can undo it is the one who did it."

"Then you _definitely_ don't want to break that radio."

"No, you don't."

He took a deep breath, then set his shoulders. Jody felt her own shoulders tense. She did not like the look on his face, which meant she probably wasn't going to like what he was about to say, either.

"Which is why I can't just hand this off to someone else to finish."

"You can't go back there," she said incredulous.

He gave her that look right back. "What choice do I have? Jody, there are two more victims out there who might still be alive, assuming they haven't found any more kids since I took off."

"And what about Sam?" Even as the words were leaving her mouth, she realized it was the wrong thing to say. Dean's eyes went hard.

"He's _why_ I can't just walk away," he answered in the coldest voice she'd ever heard him use. She'd seen the way Sam responded to people and things that threatened Dean on more than one occasion, and it had been downright frightening. It didn't hold a candle to Dean.

"I'm not saying just walk away," she insisted, trying to defuse the situation, "just let someone else handle it. There must be someone else you can contact about this. You're not the only Hunter out there."

Even as she was making her case, he was shaking his head. "You don't understand."

"Then explain it to me." There it was again, that urge to smack him or hug him… or maybe to smack him and _then_ hug him. Why did they think that _everything_ fell on them to fix? "Dean, please. _You_ called _me_ , remember?"

He pushed himself to his feet and started to pace, his fingers clutching the strands of his closely-cropped hair. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Sammy toddled over to where Jody sat and thrust out the small, stuffed animal he held in his hand.

Stunned, she looked up at Dean. He looked back at the scene with a strange sort of sick dread she didn't understand. She looked back at Sammy and forced a smile. It really wasn't that difficult. He was a cute kid, with those bright dark eyes, dimples, and mop of dark curls.

"What do you have there?" she asked him. She held out her hand and he put the stuffed animal in her palm. She turned it over, taking in the dark brown fur and the tan antlers on its head. "Is this a moose?"

He giggled, the sound just bubbling right out of him. "Dat wittle man cawed me Moose," he said as though it was the funniest thing ever. "He so siwwy."

She blinked. It was the first thing she'd heard him say since they'd arrived. "Little man?" she asked, looking up at Dean. He looked stricken. "Dean?"

His hands flopped down to his sides and he blew out a deep breath. "Crowley."

" _Crow—"_ A look of alarm flashed across Dean's face and she quickly reined in her reaction. It wasn't easy. "Crowley?" After all this time, the name still gave her chills.

Dean nodded. "He called Sam that all the time. Used to annoy the crap outta him, too."

"And he remembers that?" she asked. Sammy reached out to take the stuffed animal back and it was all she could do _not_ to yank it away. No wonder Dean looked so nauseated at the sight of it. Just the feel of it was starting to make her skin crawl.

Apparently, it held no such horror for Sammy. The child clutched it to his chest and gave her another smile, innocent and unaffected.

"He remembers a lot of things," Dean said, "but in weird ways. He asks about our dad and… and Bobby like he thinks they just stepped out t'get lunch, and then he turns around and says stuff like _that_." He pointed to the stuffed animal with a look of disgust on his face. He shook his head and snorted wryly. "He remembers you."

"He does?" She looked at Sammy. "Do you remember me?"

He nodded his head. "Dody," he answered as though she was now the one being so silly. "You had aw da books, an' we wed dem 'til you made me go to sweep."

"Oh my God," she uttered. "Chronos?"

Dean just shook his head and turned away. He didn't want to know; it was clear in every line of his body. "Now do you get it?" he asked, his back to her. "Why I can't just dump this off on someone else?"

Sammy knelt down on the floor near her feet and started "walking" the moose across the floor in little bouncing motions, crawling forward when he could no longer reach. He circled the coffee table, heading back to the pile of puzzles he'd left by the other couch, while Dean paced in the opposite direction.

"He can't stay like this, Jody," he said. "And no one out there is gonna care one bit if taking this thing out leaves him stuck this way. Hell, there's probably a whole slew of Hunters who'd like nothin' better."

He turned and faced her. "I have to go back, but…"

She was moving before she'd really given it any thought, pushing herself to her feet and crossing the floor in two firm strides, stepping right into his personal space so she could…

…cuff him lightly across the back of the head.

"Ow!" he cried, his hand flying to the spot. She knew it hadn't hurt all that much. Those Winchesters had two of the hardest, most stone-thick heads she'd ever had the misfortune to encounter, and her hand wasn't even registering the impact. It was more the shock of it that put that wounded-little-boy look on his face. "What the—"

"Dean Winchester, I swear," she hissed through her teeth, so beyond exasperated it was almost laughable. "Are you asking me to _babysit_ your _brother_ while you go _hunting?"_

He made a face. "Well, it's not like I can just leave him in the motel," he hissed back angrily. Just as quickly, the anger left him. He looked at Sammy playing happily at the end of the couch, and the desperation on his face broke her heart. He dropped his gaze to the floor. "Look, this is so beyond… wrong and… I'm sorry for dumpin' all this on you. But I don't know who..."

She threw a finger up in front of his face. "Don't!" she warned, "make me hit you again."

It was a threat every bit as hollow as her resistance, and she knew it. A little voice in the back of her head was screaming at her in a panic to stop, to _just don't_ , but another was stomping right the hell over the top of it. Of course, she was going to help them. She'd known that as soon as she'd hung up her phone and headed downstairs to begin her caffeine-induced vigil. Why was she balking, now?

"Please," Dean said, not quite begging, though it was close. "I need to know he's safe."

~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~

Yes, she was going to help them. How could she not? Though, how exactly she was going to do this, she wasn't so certain. She couldn't exactly take a three-year-old to the station and tuck him behind her desk all day while she was out making her rounds, and she sure as hell couldn't have him riding shotgun in the squad car beside her. And leaving him home alone in her house was no less ridiculous than leaving him in a motel room. She'd have thrown the cuffs on Dean herself if she'd found out he'd done something so irresponsible.

Sure she'd been stockpiling leave for quite a while—there didn't seem much reason to take vacation time when she had no where she wanted to go and nothing she really wanted to do: weekends were difficult enough, rattling around an empty house with nothing to do except notice the emptiness—but she couldn't just take off without some warning.

Dean was itching to get back on the road. That was clear by how he was throwing impatient glances at the clock on her mantel. He was throwing just as many, if not more, guilty glances at Sammy playing quietly at his feet. To say he was torn was an understatement of monumental proportions.

 _Welcome to the Working Parents' Club, Dean,_ she thought sympathetically.

It was surprising how at ease he seemed around the child, holding him and interacting with him as though he'd been around children all his life. She'd know fathers who still seemed more thumbs than fingers around their second kids as they'd seemed with their first. But when Dean spoke to Sammy, he squatted down to the child's level, or scooped him up in his arms to bring Sammy up to his, and he softened his tone and expression until no hint remained of the intimidating and fierce young man Jody knew he could be.

He was like two completely different people.

Jody spent the morning making calls. She considered those two boys her responsibility, so it really didn't feel like that much of a lie to say that a family emergency required that she take a week off to take care of the child while more permanent arrangements could be made. With luck, those permanent arrangements would be that the child would turn back into the adult he was supposed to be by the end of the week.

She wasn't going to tempt Fate by contemplating any other alternative.

Around late morning, Sammy was yawning heavily and rubbing at his eyes with his fists, and Dean was looking ready to grind his own eyes out of their sockets with fatigue. Jody felt even less guilty about looking right at Dean and bold-faced lying to him about needing to head to the station for an hour or so to close up a few things before handing over the reins for the week.

"You both look like you could use a nap," she said casually. "Why don't you catch a few Zs while I'm gone?"

Sammy looked up from his puzzles and books, and he shook his head stubbornly. "No nap," he declared even as he blinked up at Dean sleepily.

Dean just chuckled. "Don't know about you, Squirt, but I could sure use one." He patted his knees invitingly. "Wanna keep me company?"

Sammy seemed to think about it, screwing up is chubby face and tipping his head to the side as though he suspected a trick. Then he pushed himself to his feet and toddled over to the bag at the end of the couch. As Jody watched, he reached into the bag and pulled out another small stuffed animal—a tiger, judging by the orange and black striped fur—then crawled up into Dean's lap.

Dean retrieved the old, thread-worn blanket they'd arrived with and wrapped it around Sammy's small body, then settled back on the couch. Sammy squirmed a bit then dropped his head onto Dean's shoulder. He clutched the tiger close to his chest and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

"Dee, you sweep, now?" he whispered around the digit.

Dean smiled, closing his eyes. "Yup. Thanks, buddy."

Sammy lifted his head and looked up at Dean's face, suspicion narrowing his sharp, albeit sleepy eyes. Jody held her breath. Dean didn't move, asleep by all appearances even though she knew he was faking. Eventually, Sammy dropped his head back down onto Dean's shoulder. He blinked a few more times, then fell asleep.

Dean opened his eyes a few minutes later. Catching her watching, he waved her off and mouthed, "We're good."

She grabbed her coat off the rack, wondering as she slipped her hands through the sleeves and yanked the zipper closed if he'd actually try to sleep while she was gone. He looked exhausted, as though he'd been holding vigil for days not daring to do more than catch catnaps here and there. Time was of the essence. She understood that, but she'd feel a hell of a lot better if she could get him to put off leaving until tomorrow.

~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~

Her 'trip to the station' kept her gone for about 2 hours, but only because she'd swung by the grocery store on the way home. It wasn't as if she kept juice boxes and fruit snacks in the pantry anymore, and who knew when she'd get the chance, next?

She snuck in through the back door, laden down with grocery bags and a stack of file folders from work tucked under her arm, trying her damnedest _not_ to alert Dean to her return. If he was still sleeping, she didn't want to wake him. She set the bags on the counter and tucked the file folders between the flour and sugar canisters for safekeeping while she put away the fifteen-or-so items she'd bought.

She made quick work of the task; then tucking the folders back under her arm, she walked quietly to the living room.

She'd kicked her shoes off at the door, but it hadn't made any difference. Dean's eyes snapped open the minute she stepped into the room as though he'd been listening for her return. Knowing him, he probably had. He blinked up at her over the top of Sammy's head, then glanced beyond her to the clock on the mantel behind her. His eyes grew wide with surprise.

 _Maybe he actually did sleep while I was gone,_ she thought with relief.

He slowly sat up, supporting Sammy's body so snuggly against his chest and shoulder that the child didn't even stir at the change in position.

"Any problems?" he asked.

She shook her head, and he nodded. Was it her imagination, or did he actually look a little disappointed? What if there had been a problem? What if she hadn't been able to jockey around her schedule to help him? What would he have done, then?

"Dean," she said, though where she was going with the rest of that was a mystery. Don't go? She understood; it wasn't an option no matter how much she wished otherwise.

As if he knew where her thoughts were going—or perhaps feared they might _try_ to go—he shook his head. His expression went hard. Serious, not cruel. But she knew he would brook no more arguments or pleas. In a move so smooth and gentle she couldn't even break it down into its individual parts, he twisted and deposited Sammy—all swaddled in the blanket like he was still being held—onto his tummy on the couch, then pushed himself to his feet.

Sammy slept on.

For the next hour or so, he gave her a crash course in Sammy 101: his food preferences and sleep patterns, likes and dislikes, how to soothe him if he became frightened, and how to tell if he was getting sick.

"In other words," she said finally, "not much different than when he was thirty."

By the time Sammy woke from his nap, alerting them to the fact with a soft thud of little feet hitting the floor followed by the harder impact of wooden puzzle pieces or blocks, Dean had clearly run out of things to tell her. Still, he seemed to be stalling, grasping after excuses for staying just a little bit longer. She didn't bother pointing out that she wasn't the one pushing him out the door with only two hours of sleep and a ham and cheese on whole wheat bread.

She still would have preferred he stay the night and head out in the morning, but he had made it clear that _that_ was not an option. Every hour he delayed was another hour some poor victim might not have left.

That _Sam_ might not have left.

Well, if Dean couldn't wait for it to fall off on its own, it was better just to tear that Band-Aid off quick than to drag it out. Especially if she wanted any hope of getting a distraught Sammy settled down before bedtime.

She turned slightly on the couch on which they sat side by side, and put her hand on his arm. "Dean, you wouldn't have come here if you didn't already know that I could handle the job, right?"

He sighed heavily, dragging his other hand down his face in a gesture she'd seen him use when caught between an emotional rock and a hard place. He nodded.

"Okay, then. You say you have to do this, and I believe you. I _don't_ like it, but…" She shrugged. "When it comes to this stuff, you guys are the experts, not me. So, you go do what you have to do. Me and Sammy…? We'll just hang out here together until you get back. Just, no dawdling to smell the roses along the way. Understand?"

The corner of his mouth twitched. "Yes, ma'am." At her warning glare, he quickly amended, "Yes, _Jody._ "

His gaze drifted over to where Sammy quietly played in his pile of puzzles and letter blocks, that stuffed moose once again clutched against his chest. "Give us a minute?" Dean requested.

She gave his arm a little squeeze. "Keep it simple," she advised. "And don't you dare make him any promises unless you know you can keep 'em."

He gave her a strange smile. "This ain't my first rodeo," he said cryptically.

She vowed she was going to get their life story one of these days, even if she had to get them both—once they were _both_ back to their appropriate ages, that is—drunk to do it. She pushed herself to her feet and left the room, pausing at the threshold of the kitchen when she heard Dean say, "Hey, Sammy. C'mere for a sec'."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

It was 2:26 in the afternoon, a few minutes shy of 12 hours from when he'd called her and asked for her help, a little over seven hours from when he'd shown up on her doorstep and introduced her to his magically de-aged little brother. He looked only marginally less exhausted than he'd looked when he'd arrived, but at least _some_ of the lost desperation had faded from his eyes.

Jody supposed she'd have to be content that she'd been able to do that small bit for him before sending him on his way.

He held Sammy in his arms, the toddler's arms and legs wrapped so tightly around Dean's body she didn't know how he wasn't choking them both. His face was buried in Dean's collar and his small shoulders were shaking with silent sobs.

"Hey, now," Dean said softly. "None of that. You promised me you'd be brave while I'm gone, remember?"

The dark head rolled back and forth against Dean's shoulders. "Wanna come, too."

Dean cupped his hand behind his brother's head and rested his cheek against the soft curls. "I know you do, Tiger, and I really wish you could. But where I'm going is no place for a little guy like you."

"Big people onwy?" Sammy asked, his words muffled in Dean's collar.

"'Fraid so."

"You come back?"

Jody's hand went to her mouth as tears pricked at her eyes. The doubt and fear in his voice was heartbreaking.

"I'll be back as soon as I can, Sammy. I promise."

There was the promise she'd hoped Dean wouldn't make, the very words that would make Dean a liar in Sammy's eyes if the worst should happen. Jody wasn't naïve. A Hunter's life was dangerous. No matter how good a Hunter was, it only took a monster that was a little bit better, a little bit faster, or a little bit luckier to take him down.

Once again, it was on the tip of her tongue to try to talk him out of going, to try to convince him to call in someone— _anyone—_ else to finish this case. If something were to happen to Dean, who would know to call her to let her know?

It certainly wasn't the first time that thought had crossed her mind either.

"You be a good boy for Jody, 'kay," Dean said. He settled Sammy back on his hip so he could look at him. The child's face was flush with distress, his eyes dark and filled with tears. His lower lip was thrust out and quivering slightly. "You do what she says and don't give her a hard time."

Sammy sniffled loudly, but he blinked back his tears in a way no three-year-old ever should be able to do and nodded his head. "I be good."

Dean smiled and gave him a little bounce that coaxed a tiny crater in Sammy's cheek. "I know you will." He turned to Jody. "Now, off you go."

Jody put out her arms and Sammy let himself be handed off without a fuss, wrapping his little arms around her neck and settling on her hip. She'd expected him to hesitate or to squirm to be put down, but he merely turned his head so he could see Dean.

Dean looked like he wished Sammy had hidden his face so he wouldn't have to keep up the charade that he was just stepping out and it was no big deal.

 _Back before you know it._

 _You won't even notice I'm gone._

Jody could see beneath that mask. It was going to feel like forever for them both.

"We'll be fine," she said, affecting a cheerful tone and expression she really didn't feel. When Dean's eyes snapped to hers, though, she mouthed, _You call me!_

Dean gave her a subtle nod. He reached out and ruffled Sammy's hair, then spun on his heels and left without another backwards glance.

Jody and Sammy stood in the open doorway and watched until the Impala reached the end of her street and turned onto the road that would take him out of town. Sammy dropped his head onto her shoulder and sighed heavily. She could feel his little fingers twirling in the hair at the nape of her neck, and she rubbed his back in sympathy.

"He gonna go catch da bad guy," Sammy said suddenly. There was such confidence in that sad, soft voice, and Jody couldn't help but wonder whom Sammy was trying to convince or reassure.

She had a feeling it was her.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	3. Chapter 3

**~~~~~Chapter 3~~~~~**

( _Friday 5:30PM_ )

A Dean-less Sammy was an inconsolable Sammy. Jody wasn't the slightest bit surprised. After all, a Dean-less Sam hadn't exactly been a Sunday stroll through the park. Laser-focused, over-caffeinated and under-fed, and so damned sleep-deprived she'd had to pull out the big guns to get him to take a nap; if Dean had _half_ an inkling what the adult version of his little brother was like when he wasn't around, it was no wonder he'd been so reluctant to leave behind the child version.

Sammy stood by the front window, his stuffed moose clutched to his chest, and stared out at the empty span of street in front of her house. He'd been there for most of the afternoon. She'd tried to draw him out, with books and puzzles and ice cream, but he'd wanted no part of any of it. He hadn't made a peep. He'd just looked up at her each time with big sad eyes and asked, "Dee comin' back, soon?"

Finally, she'd stopped trying to coax him away from his vigil. He was quiet and calm, despite the big, silicone-drop tears that spiked his lashes and broke her heart. There was nothing she could do to soothe him at the moment, and she knew from experience that crowding him would only upset him worse.

She'd told him to let her know if he wanted something to eat or drink, or if he had to go to the bathroom—Dean had assured her that diapers hadn't been necessary, thank God for small mercies! He'd given her a solemn nod then turned back toward the window.

He hadn't asked for anything. For the most part, he hadn't paid her any mind at all. She sat on the couch, a pile of case files stacked on the coffee table in front of her, and made quick work through the reports awaiting her signatures.

Finally, she tucked the last report into its file and stacked the folder onto the top of the pile, then sat back on the couch. A quick glance at the clock on the mantel told her it was far later than she'd realized.

"Sammy, honey, are you getting hungry?" It was a little past 5:30, so even if he wasn't she was going to have to force the issue. Sure enough, he shook his head.

She sighed. Pushing herself to her feet, she went over to the window that had held him so transfixed and pulled the curtain aside. The sun had set well over an hour ago, yet it wasn't very dark, the near full moon reflecting off the snow-covered ground.

The moon would be full in two days. She couldn't help but wonder if that was relevant to the spell that had transformed Sam and those other young men. What, if anything, would that do to Dean's time limit? Dean had said that reversing or breaking the spell depended so much on what type of witch had cast it in the first place. If it was tied to the phases of the moon, did the full moon help Dean or hurt him? Would this witch be harder to stop in the days leading up to the full moon, or easier?

That train of thought wasn't doing anything but making her shoulders tense and her stomach knot, and it really wasn't her nature to stand there wringing her hands over things she could do nothing about, anyway. She let the curtain drop and squatted down beside Sammy.

"Hey, sweetie." She felt herself smirk at the endearment. She'd been so tempted to call Sam that so many times during the Chronus incident _._ If there was ever a boy who needed to be called _sweetie_ , it was Sam.

Of course, _Sam_ wouldn't have appreciated it. He seemed a little… _prickly_ about such things, embarrassed and exasperated at the same time by any amount of fussing or coddling or imposing of anyone's will over his own, even—or _especially_ —when it was for his own good.

 _Sammy_ , on the other hand, seemed a little confused by it. He pushed his face into his stuffed moose and peeked out at her from between the plush antlers and his hair with a look that seemed as cautious as it was curious, as though the only people he'd ever heard that word from had been strangers he'd been taught not to trust, and therefore the word itself was suspect.

Clearly, he trusted her. He remembered her from before, when he'd been older—which had to be the strangest sentence she'd ever thought in her entire life. He'd gone right to her when Dean had handed him off, too. Why he should be so shy now made little sense.

She put her hand on his back, and he edged closer to her until he was leaning against her side well within the circle of her arm. _So, not shy_ , she thought.

"Dee said I 'posta be bwave," he uttered into the moose's head. His breath hitched at the last word, and his eyes filled with tears.

"Aww, sweetie, you're being very brave," she told him.

He shook his head. "Nu-huh."

Before she could give him back an emphatic _'Ah-huh!'_ her cell phone started buzzing against the hard, wooden tabletop. Normally, she would have let it ring, but she didn't dare. She'd told Dean to call her, after all. It seemed unlikely he'd be back in Nebraska, already, but just in case…

"I'll be right back, okay?"

Sammy clutched his stuffed toy tighter to his chest and nodded. She rubbed his back, then stood up. She made it to the table by the third buzz and snapped her phone open.

"Mills," she said by way of greeting.

 _"And here I thought I was suppose t'call you Jody,"_ the voice on the other end of the phone said.

Dean.

She smiled, even as she chided in her best _Sheriff_ voice, "You better not tell me you're already back in Nebraska."

 _"Okay, I won't tell you."_

He sounded tired, but she could hear a hint of humor in his voice. She could picture that charming, devil-may-care smile crinkling the corners of his eyes and pulling the corner of his mouth. It wasn't going to stop her from kicking his ass if he got himself busted for speeding through some rural backwater and she had to bail him out.

"Don't tempt the length of my reach, young man."

 _"No, ma'am."_

Ma'am, indeed. Those Winchester boys could be damned polite when they wanted to be. She sat down on the arm of her couch and switched the phone to her other ear. "You just checking in, or…" She let the rest of it trail off for him to fill in as he would.

 _"Just followin' orders,"_ he drawled evasively.

"Since when?"

He chuckled. There was a slight pause, then, _"How's Sammy doing?"_

She looked over at the window where Sammy still stood with his face pressed into his stuffed animal. She was going to have to throw that thing in the washer if he kept that up much longer. With luck, it wouldn't survive.

She sighed. "About as good as can be expected."

 _"He giving you a hard time?"_

"No," she hastened to assure him. "He's just a little… distraught at the moment."

 _"Standin' by the window?"_ he guessed, startling a laugh out of her. Figures, he'd know that. _"Put me on speaker."_

She hesitated, not wanting to upset the child even more by getting his hopes up; but then again, maybe it would help for him to hear Dean's voice. With luck, maybe Dean could persuade him to have some dinner, if nothing else.

"Hold on." She hit he speaker button and tapped the volume button to set it on max. "All set."

 _"Hey, Sammy!"_

Dean's voice came out of the tiny speaker sounding tinny and weak, but Sammy's head snapped up and he spun around to face her at the sound of his name. "Dee?"

Jody smiled and waved him closer, holding out her hand with the phone resting in the center of her palm. "You want to say hi?"

He nodded, blinking his tear-soaked eyes, then ran over to her. He looked at the phone then at her, pulling his lower lip between his teeth. The moose inched up toward his face once more.

"Are you going to say hi?" she asked, holding the phone closer to his face.

 _"Hey, Tiger,"_ Dean said.

Sammy sucked in a small breath, his eye growing wide. "Hi, Dee."

 _"You bein' good for Jody?"_

Sammy looked up at Jody as if he wasn't sure and she nodded. "Yup. You comin' back?"

There was a moment of silence, then, _"Not for a while, buddy."_ His voice was even, but that little pause said volumes to Jody.

Sammy's eyes filled with tears again and he sniffled loudly. "But…"

 _"Ah, c'mon, Sammy. None of that. You were all excited when I told ya you were gonna visit Jody, remember?"_

"Ah-huh," came the small reply, and Jody couldn't help the smile that news brought to her face.

 _"Okay, then. So, what's the matter?"_

He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed his face into the moose, again. "Scared," he uttered.

Jody slid down onto the cushion and put her arm on his back. As he'd done earlier, he drew a little closer to her.

 _"Scared?"_ Dean repeated. Knowing what Jody now knew, she wasn't surprised when Dean didn't ask him _why_ he was scared. _"Hey, what do I always tell you?"_ The little shoulders rose and fell in a small shrug, but Sammy popped his head up enough to look over the top of the moose's head. _"Sammy?"_ Dean coaxed when no answer came.

"Dat you Batman?"

Jody laughed, but Dean didn't miss a beat. _"Yup,"_ he answered as though that had been a perfectly acceptable—and maybe expected—answer _. "And what's the_ other _thing I always tell you?"_

The moose lowered as Sammy blinked down at the phone. "Dat nuffin bad's gonna happen s'wong as you awound." There was no doubt in his voice when he said it, as though it was something he had been told so often he believed it completely. Was this another memory from years ago still lurking in his mind, or something more recent?

 _"That's right."_

"But you not here."

Jody shook her head. Even at three, Sam Winchester was too logical for his own good.

 _"No, I'm not,"_ Dean replied immediately. _"But Jody is, right? And she won't let nothing bad happen to you either, 'cause she's like…"_

Dean's voice trailed off. Jody really hoped she wasn't going to have to fill in the blank, because she didn't have the first clue who might put the child at ease. Then Sammy looked up at her, his eyes going wide with what almost looked like awe.

"Wonder Woman?" he said.

Jody heard Dean snort on the other end of the line. She couldn't really complain. She'd almost snorted, herself. _Wonder what I've gotten myself into, woman, more like it_ , she thought.

 _"Exactly!"_ Dean said. _"Just like Wonder Woman."_

But damn if Sammy didn't look hopeful, all big, liquid eyes blinking up at her with his mouth open in a small 'O'. Well, as long as she didn't have to don a star spangled bathing suit and start twirling in her living room…

 _"So, you be a good boy. And no lyin', 'cause she'll know!"_ Dean warned.

Sammy shook his head, still looking up at her. "I be good."

She smiled at him and ruffled his hair. "Of course, you will," she said and he smiled back at her.

 _"So look, buddy,"_ Dean said, _"I'm guessin' it's getting t' be about dinner time, there, so I'm gonna go now; but I'll call you, tomorrow, okay?"_

Jody cringed, expecting Sammy to get upset all over again. To her surprise, he didn't do more than frown.

"Pwomise?"

 _"You know it!"_

The frown grew deeper, something creeping into his eyes that seemed, to Jody, more _Sam_ than _Sammy_. "An' you have supper, too?"

Dean huffed. _"Yeah, Sammy. I'll eat, and I'll get some sleep, too. Okay?"_

"'Kay." Just like that, the look was gone and he was _Sammy_ again. "Me, too."

 _"Promise?"_ Dean said.

He canted his head to one side, his hair flopping into his eyes. "Know it!" he said, trying to sound like Dean had sounded when he'd said it. He giggled and Jody could hear Dean laugh on his end.

 _"G'night, Sammy."_

"Night, Dee."

Jody hit the speaker button then put the phone back to her ear. "Thanks, _Bruce_ ," she teased.

Dean laughed tiredly," _Anytime,_ Diana," he teased back. " _God, neither of us is gonna live that down anytime soon, huh_."

"Probably, not," she agreed. "So, uh…" Sammy still stood by her side, his moose tucked up under his chin as he watched her. She had to pick her words carefully. "How are things there?"

Dean was slow to answer, and when he finally spoke, it was as if he'd aged ten years. " _Another went missing, last night. Hit the evening news as I was checking in._ "

She could hear him sigh over the line and she didn't have to strain her imagination a bit to know that he was blaming himself for the latest victim. Nothing she said was going to shift that blame either. She knew that, too; though it didn't stop her from wanting to try. Unfortunately, there was little she could say with Sammy standing right there.

"You'll get 'im, Dean," she said instead, hoping Dean would know it was more than just a platitude.

 _"Damn straight,"_ he said fiercely. Then, sounding less harsh, _"Look… Just watch…"_

"Hey, we'll be fine."

 _"Promise?"_

She looked down at Sammy staring back at her with such trust, and she felt a fierceness of her own. Nothing bad was going to happen to him on her watch.

"You know it," she answered back.

He chuckled. _"Yeah, I do. Thanks."_

"Don't mention it," she said. "Now, go grab some grub then get some rest."

 _"Yes, ma'am."_

The call disconnected. Jody snapped the phone shut and put it on the coffee table, then leaned forward to Sammy's eye level. "Well, what do you say we find something to eat?"

Sammy blinked up at her through his lashes. "Do you have chicken nuggets?"

Even with the traces of his earlier distress smeared across his face, she would have had to be made of sterner stuff to resist such an expression. Thankfully, she didn't have to try.

"As a matter of fact, I do."

His eyes got even wider. "And fwench fwies?"

"Of course. You can't have chicken nuggets without french fries, right?"

"Wight!" His whole face lit up with a smile, his dimples reappearing for the first time since Dean had left.

"All right, then." She pushed herself to her feet and extended her hand out to him. He didn't hesitate; just reached out and took it, letting her lead him out of the room. "But, first, what d'ya say we wash your face?"

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

Sammy yawned for the third time, and rubbed his fist into his eyes. He sat on the floor with a wooden puzzle between his widespread legs and manipulated the yellow dog into its space beside the brown one. Jody had watched him make that same puzzle four times since they'd come back into the living room after eating dinner, and he seemed no less interested in the way the shapes fit together now than when he'd first pulled it out of the bag.

Dinner had been a lot more successful than she'd originally thought it would be. Dean had warned her that he could be a finicky eater. But he'd eaten three whole chicken nuggets and one bite of the fourth and eight French fries, and he'd drunk a whole—small—glass of milk before declaring that he was _all full up now,_ and asking very politely, _can I be done?_

It was now pushing 8:00 and Sammy seemed to be pushing against his wall for the day. Truth be told, Jody was ready to call it a night herself. It was hard to believe that just that morning Dean had woken her up with a plea for help and then had shown up at her doorstep with the little boy who now sat so contently on her living room floor. It felt more like several days had passed.

Sammy rubbed at his eyes again.

"Hey, Sammy," she called over softly, "you gettin' sleepy?" He looked up at her, then shook his head; but his eyes told a much different tale. "How about we get you ready for bed so when you _do_ get sleepy, you won't have to wait so long to go to sleep?"

He seemed to think about that for a minute, his big eyes blinking with leaded, dark-lashed lids. He dropped the last puzzle piece on the floor next to the puzzle and pushed himself to his feet.

For a chronic bachelor who'd suddenly found himself in charge of a toddler, Dean seemed very well versed in their care. The duffle bag he'd left with her—the one that _wasn't_ filled with puzzles, books, crayons, pads of paper, and wooden blocks—had pajamas and changes of clothes: socks, underwear, tee-shirts, hood-less sweat shirts, and jeans; plus a toothbrush, children's toothpaste, baby shampoo, children's Tylenol, and children's cough-syrup. Rifling through all that to retrieve his pajamas, Jody was tempted to give Dean a call to ask him just how long he thought Sammy would be around to need all this stuff.

Then again, she recognized a panicked shopper when she saw the symptoms.

She chuckled to herself when she pulled out the black and grey two-piece pajama set, with the cartoon Batman and Robin decal across the chest, then laughed when Sammy started to jump up and down in excitement at the sight of it. At least getting him into his pajamas wasn't going to be difficult.

Sure enough, within thirty minutes Sammy was ready for bed: bathed, pajamas on, and teeth brushed; and he was back on the floor putting the last puzzle piece in place. Any concern she'd had about him finding his second wind proved unwarranted. He looked like he was ready to flop over on top of it in any minute.

"I think it's time for bed," Jody told him, bracing herself for resistance of some kind. He looked up at her and sighed heavily, a little glint of stubbornness flaring in his sleepy eyes. Yet, when she reached out her hands to him, he went right up into her arms without a fuss. His little arms went around her neck and his head dropped heavily onto her shoulder. He smelled of baby shampoo, touching off memories she'd buried down deep but had never truly forgotten—no, _never_ forgotten.

Dean had assured her that he could sleep in a normal bed without falling out. She'd given him a doubtful look but he'd just smiled back at her with a wry grin and had said, "Trust me," in a way that hinted of more factoids from their history she knew nothing about and probably would rather not know. The single bed in her spare bedroom would be fine.

She lay Sammy down in the center of the bed and pulled the blankets up around him. He blinked up at her from the pillow, his eyes looking more brown than hazel in the dim light coming from the nightlight in the wall. It was then she noticed the stuffed moose he'd been carrying around with him all day was gone. She cast a quick look around the floor of the room, but it was nowhere to be seen.

"Do you want your moose?" she asked him.

His eyes grew fearful, and he shook his head. "Don't wike dat here," he said, a note of panic in his small voice.

She drew back in surprise. He certainly hadn't been afraid of it earlier—no matter how much the thing made her skin crawl. Sammy clutched at the blankets, pulling them tight to his chin as though he wanted to pull them over his head. His eyes began to shine with the threat of tears.

"It's okay, sweetie," she hushed him with a gentle hand on the side of his face. "You don't have to have it if you don't want it. Do you have something else you like to sleep with?"

He pulled the blankets a little higher and nodded. "I want da wittwe tiger."

"The little tiger?" Then she remembered. He'd had a small, stuffed tiger when he'd lain down with Dean for his nap. She hadn't seen it since he woke up. She could only hope it had ended up back in the bag with his toys, or she didn't care how friggin' far away Dean was at the moment; she would be calling him. "Okay, I'll go look for it."

She left him burrowed in the blankets and hurried back to the living room. The duffle bag of Sammy's toys was on the floor near the puzzle he'd been making earlier—as was the stuffed moose he suddenly seemed so afraid of—and she snatched it up and set it on the coffee table. She pulled out the remaining four puzzles and set them on the table, then a small pile of books. The pad of paper and thick coloring book came out next. There, in the bottom of the bag with his crayons and loose blocks, was the small stuffed tiger. She plucked it from the bag and hurried back to the room.

Sammy's eyes lit up at the sight of it. He reached out with both hands, his little fingers opening and closing eagerly. She handed it to him and he hugged it to his chest. All traces of his earlier fear were gone and he smiled up at her.

"Is that better?" she asked unnecessarily. It was fairly obvious that it was.

Dimples formed in both cheeks as Sammy turned on his side and cuddled the stuffed animal in his arms. "Dee caws me Tiger," he declared around a big yawn.

"That's right. He does." She adjusted the blankets around his little shoulders and gave in to the impulse to run her fingers through the soft, sable locks at his temple. His eyes closed, but his smile stayed in place. "Sweet dreams, Sammy."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	4. Chapter 4

**~~~~~Chapter 4~~~~~**

( _Saturday 7:30AM_ )

Jody woke with a sharp stab of sunlight spearing through her undrawn bedroom drapes directly across her closed eyelids, and the dull ache of realization that it was Saturday morning and she had nowhere she was supposed to be except at home. It was something she tried to avoid.

She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms above her head. In the first weeks after…Sean, she'd wake and reach her left hand out to the side before opening her eyes, sliding her hand across the cold and empty side of the bed as though it was somehow better/easier to _feel_ the reality of her new life than to start each morning with the _sight_ of it. It really wasn't; which was why she'd stopped doing it.

She hooked her hands around the pillow under her head then let her arms fall across her eyes. She had no idea what time it was, but she knew she'd slept far later than she usually allowed herself to on a Saturday, and far later than she'd meant to with a child in her care.

She strained her ears for signs that Sammy was awake, but all was silent. That was never a good thing with a three-year-old. She tossed back her covers with a sigh and rolled out of bed. She slipped her feet into her slippers and her arms into her bathrobe, and hurried from her room. Sammy's door was still closed, and she opened it quietly just in case, by some fluke, he was still sleeping.

The bed was empty, the sheets half pulled out of the mattress and trailing across the floor. The blanket was missing, as was the pillow. She cast a quick look around the room. It wasn't that big, and there weren't that many places behind, under, or in which a child could hide, even one as small and determined as Sammy.

"Sammy?" she called softly as she leaned down and peered under the trailing sheet. Not finding him under the bed, she called a little louder, keeping her tone calm and even so as not to frighten him. "Sammy, where are you, sweetie?"

She made her way over to the dresser. There was about a foot of space between the end of the bureau and the adjacent wall. He wasn't there either. That left only one more place to look.

She tapped her knuckles against the closet door. "Sammy?"

There was silence, then a small hitch of breath followed by a tentative, "Dody?"

She opened the door. Nestled on the floor in a makeshift nest of his pillow and blanket sat Sammy. "What are you doing in here?" she asked, squatting down in front of him.

He blinked at her from behind his stuffed tiger. "Dee says I 'posta hide in da cwoset if a monster come," he said timidly.

"Monster?" she asked. She extended her hand out to him, and he rose up out of the protection of the blanket. "There's no monster here, sweetie."

"I heared it," he said. "It wumbled and wumbled and wumbled outside."

"Outside, huh?" She straightened and looked toward the window. She hadn't heard anything, last night; but then, she'd hit her pillow hard. "How 'bout I take a look?"

Sammy shook his head and sank back deeper into the closet. She left him there where he clearly felt safe—and tried not to think about what it meant that, at some point in Sammy's life, Dean had given him instructions like that—and made her way over to the window. She drew aside the curtain and looked out into her front yard.

A layer of bright white covered everything. It had snowed quite a bit overnight, maybe about 3 or 4 inches if she had to guess, leaving her driveway and walk indiscernible from the rest of the yard. Only the street beyond was cleared, plowed and sanded at some point after the last of the snow had fallen.

She suspected she knew what Sammy had heard as he'd slept.

"Sammy, come here." She turned and beckoned to him. "Come see what's outside."

He crept forward a step. "It's not a monster, wight?"

She smiled and shook her head. "It's not a monster."

"Is it a _aminal_?" he asked. He slowly stepped out of the haven of the closet, clutching his stuffed tiger tight under his chin. "Wike a bear?"

"No." She tried very hard not to laugh. His eyes were very wide and there was a little glint of excitement in his expression despite the timid body language. She suddenly wasn't really sure if Sammy would have been scared if it had been a bear or if he was hoping it was. "It's not an animal."

He stopped at her side and looked up at her. She drew the curtain away from the window. "Take a look."

One small hand reached out for the windowsill, and he used it to pull himself up on his tiptoes. Suddenly, he drew in a deep breath. "It shnowed!" he shrieked excitedly.

She wasn't quite sure what kind of reaction she'd been expecting from him, but the big, bright eyes and deep, dimpled smile was enough to make her smile right along with him. She squatted down beside him—her knees were getting quite the workout this morning; it was a good thing she'd never had a problem with them—and put her arm around his back. He immediately leaned against her.

"You know what?" she asked him. "I bet what you heard rumbling outside last night was the snow plow pushing all that snow off the streets."

He seemed to consider that for a moment, his forehead scrunching down toward his eyebrows and his lips pursing out into a twisted pout. He then looked down at his tiger, bringing its small, furry ear close to his mouth.

"It was just a shnow pwow," he whispered.

That seemed to settle it for the both of them. Sammy turned back toward the window, his breath forming small circles of fog on the cool glass as he looked outside. Jody pushed herself back to her feet and put her hand to the back of Sammy's head. His hair was so soft and she couldn't resist running her fingers through the silky strands.

"You hungry?" she asked.

He shook his head. He looked up at her and blinked his eyes. In the sunlight, the green cast was more obvious. "Can we buiwd a shnowman?" he asked.

He looked so hopeful and excited about the prospect, and Jody's heart sank. She'd seen the clothes Dean had managed to scrape together in such short notice—clearly second-hand, but every piece clean and free of holes or stains—and they hadn't included a snowsuit or snow boots or mittens. There hadn't even been a coat; he'd arrived dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, and wrapped in an old army blanket against the cold. That was adequate protection from the elements going from the heated car to a heated house, but not to be outside for any significant length of time.

"Ah, honey. I don't think so," she told him.

His face fell, his brows pinching together over his eyes. His chin dropped slightly, but his gaze lingered a little longer. All the things Dean had told her about, all the warnings and instructions on how to take care of Sammy, and he never mentioned how to resist those eyes? He and she were going to have words about that the next time he called.

He blinked at her, and she let out a defeated sigh. "Okay, maybe. But only if we can find you something warm to wear." Hope seeped back into those expressive eyes and he nodded. And maybe she was pushing her luck a bit, but… "And you have to eat some breakfast."

The nod was much more enthusiastic, all traces of his disappointment gone. He turned away from the window and padded across the bedroom floor toward the door. Jody shook her head and followed.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

One advantage to being Sheriff in a town like Sioux Falls was that Jody kind of knew everybody. Of course, sometimes that made things very difficult for her as it meant everyone kind of knew her, as well. Other times, though, it came in handy.

Which was a very good thing since Sammy had made good on his end of the bargain by eating his breakfast.

Marjorie Turnborn had six kids of her own, and still found the time and energy to volunteer three days a week at the Church Store, a local, perish-run thrift store. Personally, Jody wondered if there wasn't a little something extra in her Starbuck's _venti_ coffee she carried every morning as she walked her Golden Retriever, Gracey, around the neighborhood. Nobody should be that _up_ at such an ungodly hour.

One call and she'd been more than happy to help Jody outfit her visiting _nephew_ with something suitable to wear in the snow. Within the hour, she had brought over a huge bag for Jody to go through, plus a snowsuit and a pair of boots she'd insisted no longer fit her youngest.

The snowsuit and boots were two sizes too big for Sammy, but he didn't seem to care. He clomped through the fluffy snow—too light and airy for making snowmen, though he didn't seem to mind that either—and flopped on his back to make snow angels while Jody pushed the snow off her driveway and walk.

She was about a third of the way down her walk when he rolled out of his latest snow angel, not the least bit upset that he'd destroyed it in doing so, and trudged his way to where she shoveled.

"I hewp?" he asked. His cheeks were rosy from the cold air, and the ends of his hair that stuck out beneath the knitted beanie hat he wore were wet with snow. His nose had starting to run and he'd smeared it across one cheek.

"Are you getting cold?"

He shook his head, smiling up at her. "Nope. C'n I shovew, too?"

"This shovel is a little too big for you," she told him. He made a face and she could see the hint of that Sam Winchester stubbornness in those cherubic features. "Maybe, I have something else you can use."

She stabbed her shovel into the snow beside the walk and beckoned him to follow her. His too-big boots clumped and scuffed on the concrete as they made their way back to her garage. She used to have smaller tools—Owen had liked to help her and Sean in the garden—but she'd gotten rid of everything after…

"I use dis?" Sammy said, and she quickly turned to see what he'd found. He held a dustpan in both hands, its brush on the floor by his feet. "Dis wike a wittwe shovew."

She nodded, swallowing past the tightness in her throat of memories she'd rather not look at too closely. "It sure is."

He followed her back out to the walk and set to work pushing the snow off her steps while she cleared the rest of the walk. By the time she reached him, he'd cleared the bottom-most step, but he looked like he was starting to fade, making half-hearted swipes at the snow covering the second step that only knocked it back onto the step below it.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

He looked up at her and sighed. "Dis hard work."

"Well, you did a really good job on that step," she praised and a dimple appeared in one rosy cheek. "How about I finish this up, and then we can go inside and have some hot cocoa."

"Wiff marshmawwows?"

"Of course."

With half a dozen swipes with her shovel, she had her front steps cleared and she and Sammy headed back to the garage to put everything away. She stomped the snow from her boots and kicked them off inside the door to dry by the baseboard. She then knelt and pealed Sammy out of his boots, snowsuit, mittens, and hat, setting them out or hanging them up to dry.

She steered him to the bathroom where she washed his face and hands and toweled off his snow-soaked hair. He blinked up at her with sleepy eyes and she contemplated just putting him down for a nap. But she had promised him hot cocoa with marshmallows, and with luck, she might actually get him to eat some lunch with it, so she scooped him up into her arms and carried him to the kitchen.

She set him up at the kitchen table with crayons and paper while she made the cocoa, glancing at him over her shoulder while she stirred chocolate syrup into milk warming in a pot on the stove. His little tongue was caught between his teeth as he concentrated on whatever it was he was drawing. He had that same intensity of focus she'd seen on Sam's face as he'd poured through websites and ancient books looking for a way to bring his brother back from the past.

When the cocoa was done, she poured it into two mugs, dropped three miniature marshmallows in each, and set them aside to cool while she made them both peanut butter sandwiches. Dean had assured her that it was one thing he could _almost_ always get Sammy to eat—that and Lucky Charms which would _never_ cross her threshold if she had anything to say about it.

She cut the two sandwiches into quarters and put them onto one plate, then carried the plate and two mugs to the table, careful to set them down away from Sammy's drawings.

"Is that Dean's car?" she asked, circling around his chair so she could look at the drawing over his shoulder. It was clearly a car, with its rectangular body and two round tires. He'd colored it all black, except for two squares to represent the side windows.

He nodded, not looking up from where he was now drawing what looked like a person in the driver's seat. "Da 'Pawa," he said. "An' dis Dee."

"That's very good. But what do you say we move this out of the way so you don't spill your cocoa on it?"

He let her gather the paper and crayons and set them aside, then took the mug of cocoa she put in front of him with both hands. "Dose are _biiiig_ mawshmawwows," he exclaimed, his eyes wide.

"Is that okay?" she asked taking the seat beside him and reaching for her own mug.

He nodded, poking at the closest one with his finger and giggling when it bobbed up and down like a buoy. He took a sip, then smiled up at her with a cocoa mustache. She offered him one of the quartered sandwiches then took one herself. He kicked his feet contentedly under the table as he ate one and a half quarters of his sandwich and drank his cocoa.

"You like that, huh?" she asked idly. He had quite a bit of it smeared across his upper lip and down his chin, but he hadn't spilled a drop even when he'd tried to fish one of the marshmallows out of the mug with his tongue.

He nodded. Then, to her surprise, he took one more sip then pushed the mug away from him unfinished.

"Had enough?"

He licked at the chocolate around his mouth and nodded. "I save dat for Dee!"

"Oh, honey. That's very sweet of you, but… You can't save hot cocoa."

"But…" His lip jutted out in a stubborn pout and he huffed out a loud breath.

"I can make some more for Dean when he gets back, okay?" she hastened to assure him.

He nodded his head, those eyes looking up at her through his lashes as though he hadn't already gotten his way. Yeah, definitely, she and Dean were going to have words.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

 _"They found another kid."_

There'd been no preamble and no witty exchange. Jody had answered her cell phone with her usual succinct and professional, "Mills," even though the caller ID was displaying Dean's name, and Dean had volleyed back with a doozy.

"I'm sorry, Kiddo," she answered. It was a lame, hollow response, one she was pretty sure felt more like salt on a wound than balm, but it was all she could offer to him from so far away.

 _"Yeah. Me, too."_ He sounded exhausted and discouraged, which only ratcheted up her helplessness. _"Fibby's still barking up the wrong tree, thank God. They think it's a pedophile grabbin' 'em from somewhere else and droppin' 'em here, and so far the local Blue are drinkin' the Kool-Aid. The ME's a cagey ole broad, though—her words, not mine. I tell ya, if I was a bettin' man—"_

"Which you are," Jody interjected smoothly.

Dean ignored the jibe but his voice sounded a little lighter. _"I'd say she knows someone in the life. Or, at least she's seen some crap that's pulled the wool off a bit, ya know?"_

 _Gee, I wonder who else that sounds like,_ Jody thought.

 _"She kinda reminds me of you, actually."_ He chuckled tiredly as he said it, a hint of his typical flirtatious warmth eking out.

"I like her already."

 _"I do, too,_ " he said. _"Anyway, I'm not sure what's got her lookin' outside the box, and the friggin' Feds showed up before I could finish…"_

"Finish?" Jody sighed.

 _"Do you really wanna know?"_ he asked, and something told her she really didn't. She'd let his earlier, casual admission to a little B and E slide by without a comment. At the time she'd been a little distracted by the reality that witches were real and that some of them really could turn you into a frog—or a three-year-old version of yourself. She wasn't so distracted now, and she was still an officer of the law.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "No, I don't think I do."

 _"Trust me, Sheriff. You don't."_

As if she needed the reminder just how far on the fringe these two lived.

 _"She cross-ran a sample of blood from the second victim,"_ he continued, oblivious to her mini ethical dilemma, _"against the kids they'd found so far. I guess the poor bastard'd had a bloody nose that morning an' he'd been in too much of a hurry to clean up his sink. Believe me, there is no sane reason for her to've done that. Something's got her thinking the two cases are related._

 _"Don't know if she got back the results— I only saw the order—but if she don't know yet what Sam an' me suspect, she soon will. Question is, what'll she do once she does? If she goes squawking to the cops and the Feds, assuming they don't lock her in the psyche ward with the good meds, and they start banging on all the doors in town, they're gonna scare our perp into packing it up and hightailing it outta Dodge. That happens and…_

Again, his words trailed off and again, the helplessness of being too far away to offer any real help tightened her throat. "What can I do?" she asked anyway.

He sighed heavily. _"Just what you're doin'. I mean it."_

The line went so quiet for a few seconds she thought the line had cut out, but then he cleared his throat. _"So, uh… Sammy's not givin' you any trouble, is he?"_

Jody smiled at the not-so-subtle change of subject, and her gaze shifted over to the end of the couch where Sammy sat in a pile of books, quietly flipping pages, that damned stuffed moose once again clutched tightly in the crook of one arm. "He's been great. No trouble at all; although you might've warned me about those eyes."

Dean snorted a laugh. _"You'd a' never believed me, anyway. That kid used to puppy-dog his way into free cookies from waitresses and store clerks everywhere we went. And I'm talkin' even from the Balbricker- and Nurse Ratched-types. You didn't stand a chance."_

"Is that so?" she challenged. Secretly, she was happy to hear the humor back in his voice. It was painfully sweet how his whole demeanor seemed to change when he spoke about Sammy, like some terrible weight suddenly lifted. She wondered if he knew it.

 _"You better hope he doesn't ask you for a puppy,"_ he returned, _"'cause, it's staying with you when we leave."_

She laughed. _We'll see about that_ , she thought. She didn't doubt for one second that Dean was as helpless to that "puppy dog" look (a very appropriate description) as everyone else. Out loud she said, "Are you gonna tell Sammy that?"

Just as she'd guessed it would, Sammy's head shot up at the sound of his name. His head tipped to one side in a very Sam-like gesture and a smile broke out across his face. She beckoned him closer while Dean claimed immunity to Sammy's unique power of persuasion in her ear.

She wasn't really listening. Sammy extracted himself from his books and crawled across the couch, then up into her lap where she settled him against her chest. She put the phone to his ear and waited, a smug grin pulling one corner of her mouth.

Sammy drew in a deep breath, his whole face alighting with excitement, and then he shrieked, "Dee!"

Sammy grabbed at the phone as Dean expressed his surprise with a decidedly non-G-rated word. Sammy gasped, scandalized. "You said a bad word."

Laughing, Jody pulled the phone back enough to hit the speaker button.

 _"… 'cuz I'm the Big Brother,"_ he was saying.

"So, that's where Sam learned that word," she teased.

 _"Someone had to teach him the important things,"_ he quipped back.

Sammy still clutched the phone as though he would pull it out of her hand. "Dee, you comin' home, now?" he asked. Jody could hear the hopefulness in his voice and she knew it was going to be dashed by Dean's reply.

 _"Not yet, Tiger."_

"But Dee—"

 _"Sorry, Sammy. A little longer, okay?"_

Sammy harrumphed loudly. But, before he could work himself up into real tears, Jody leaned over and said, "Tell Dean what you did today!"

He sniffed once. "Pwayed in da shnow," he answered.

 _"The snow!"_ Dean replied with far more enthusiasm than the news warranted. _"Dude, that's awesome!"_

It was exactly what Sammy needed to forget about his disappointment for a little while. Immediately, he became an excited little bundle in Jody's lap, chattering on about snow angels and helping Jody shovel…

 _"Good boy!"_

…and the monster snowplow that had scared his stuffed tiger…

"But not me!"

 _"Of course, not!"_

…and hot cocoa with _huge-mongus_ marshmallows that he had tried to save for Dean but couldn't…

 _"That's okay, Sammy."_

Jody just sat back and let the conversation go on in front of her. Sammy's sweet peals of laughter were such a contrast to the soft chuffs and shy smiles she'd seen Sam use to show amusement. Clear- and high-voiced and utterly unabashed in his simple innocence of all the pain and death and evil of Sam's experience, it was almost a shame that it couldn't last, that Dean was _there_ risking his life to return Sam to all _that_ when he clearly wanted to be _here_ to enjoy every minute of _this_.

"You okay?" she asked, after Sammy had run out of things to tell Dean and had promised to be good and to eat all his vegetables and to go to bed when Jody told him to, and finally had told Dean he loved him in that too-old, too-serious voice. She held the phone close to her ear while Dean composed himself on the other end, letting him hold onto his pride and the illusion of the unaffected tough guy neither one of them believed until he could speak without destroying them both.

 _"Yeah,"_ he lied and didn't even try to hide it. _"'M awesome."_

"Dean…"

He cleared his throat. _"Look, uhm… I gotta go."_

Once again, she felt the words wanting to push out past her teeth: _Come back. Let someone else take care of it. It doesn't always have to be you._ She didn't say them though. They wouldn't change his mind; this wasn't a choice he felt was his to make. They would only hurt him. So, she said the only thing she could say, the only words she thought with some confidence he would accept from her.

"You be careful out there, young man, or I'll tan your hide."

He chuckled. " _Yes, Ma'am."_

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	5. Chapter 5

**AN:** Thank you to everyone who has Followed and Favorited this story, and to everyone who has left a review. I really appreciate it. Mwah!

 **~~~~~Chapter 5~~~~~**

( _Sunday 7:00AM_ )

Sammy was awake and sitting up in his bed when Jody opened his door Sunday morning. He looked up at her and huffed with a note of exasperation. "I din't fink you'd _ever_ be awake."

She laughed. She'd seen that expression on Sam's face quite a few times, and it was no less expressive for being on a much younger face. "Waiting for me, were you?" she asked. She sat down beside him on the bed and he immediately moved closer. She wondered when Sam had started keeping distance between himself and others. Sammy seemed to like closeness, once he moved a person off his _stranger_ list, that is. He squirmed until he was sitting right beside her and lifted his stuffed tiger in front of his face.

"Dee says we 'posta stay asweep and vewy quiet 'til da big people wake up or dey might be gwumpy," he explained. His face twisted into an adorable pout. "But my body din't wisten. But," he hastened to add, "I din't make any sound, wight?"

"Nope, not a single sound," she answered, trying very hard to suppress her laughter. He looked so serious.

"So, you not gwumpy, wight?"

"Nope, I'm not grumpy."

He turned the tiger so he was looking at its face. "See?" he said as though continuing a conversation he and it had been having before she'd interrupted them by opening the door. "I towd you Dee awways wight."

The laughter won out. She put her arm around him and gave him a little squeeze that had him giggling and smiling up at her with that big-dimpled grin.

"Well, since _I'm_ awake and _not_ grumpy," she teased prompting another giggle, "and _you're_ awake, wha'diya say we go have some breakfast?"

"Wucky Charms?" he asked excitedly, blinking up at her hopefully.

"Nice try, kid," she responded, ruffling his hair.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

It felt a little strange to be sitting at her kitchen table nursing her third cup of coffee at 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Usually, she'd be sitting in a pew at church at this time, letting the solemn quiet of the place soothe some of the disquiet in her heart. She never had been a spiritual person; she'd never felt the use of reaching out to any force outside of herself. She'd certainly never thought doing so was going to fill the void in her life better than just throwing herself into her job and keeping busy.

Strange how one weird, near-death experience after one too many weird- _crap_ experiences could alter one's perspective on such things.

Whatever it was, be it a spiritual connection or something else entirely, she didn't analyze it too closely. It helped—or at least it didn't hurt—and for that reason alone, she'd made it part of her routine. The parish was welcoming and supporting without being too intrusive with their attention, and that was perfect. The last thing she'd wanted was to have to explain _why_ she was suddenly sitting in a pew instead of her squad car on Sunday morning.

Something told her she'd be pushing her luck to suddenly show up with a three-year-old though. God knows, her story wasn't going to survive any real scrutiny no matter how casual it may be.

She set her coffee mug down and peeked over the top of her laptop to where Sammy was playing on the floor. He had his puppy puzzle dumped out on the floor and he was playing with two of the individual pieces as though they were figurines, bouncing the puppies across the floor and up the small structures he'd made with his blocks.

The steady flow of chatter was surprisingly quiet, and every once and a while he'd scold one of his puppies for being too loud or for going where it shouldn't go. He'd then make a little whimpering sound and coax the wayward pup back to his side with reassurances and promises of pizza bones, whatever those were.

Or maybe the puppy's name was Bones, she realized as she watched him praise the yellow dog for coming when he called. The black puppy seemed a little more headstrong as he bounced him further and further away from him. "Wiot, you gotta come back!"

She chuckled to herself and shook her head, then turned her attention back to the laptop in front of her. The local paper wasn't likely to have much on a crime spree in Nebraska, even with the Feds involved. The good thing about the internet, though, was that you didn't need to be local to access the local scoop.

Of course, Dean's _just outside Grand Island, Nebraska_ had been a little vague; but it was more than enough of a clue to help her find what she was looking for. Well, _some_ of what she'd been looking for, at least.

 _ **Police Still Stymied by Disappearances**_

 _The rash of disappearances of young men continues to baffle law enforcement, despite increased public awareness and vigilance…_

Jody quickly scanned the article, which included the victims' names and ages but little else of any great significance. So far, the count was holding at six. Did that mean the witch didn't need any more victims? There was nothing to imply a connection to the children they'd found, and she breathed a small sigh of relief. Such a connection only would have complicated Dean's hunt, maybe even drawing more attention to the person he already suspected.

She hit the Back button and scrolled through the next few headlines.

 _ **Feds Reveal Names of Four Discovered Children**_

Jody's heart skipped a beat as her eyes scanned the teaser below.

 _Federal Investigators, during a small press conference held outside the police department headquarters, released names for the four children whose bodies were found in four different secluded areas on the outskirts of this once-quiet community._

She quickly clicked the link, tapping her fingers impatiently against the table as she waited for the page to open. When it did, she continued reading:

 _"We've named the four victims, Johnny Doe, Timmy Doe, Jimmy Doe, and Mikey Doe to facilitate easier data keeping and to protect their true identities until proper identification and notification of their legal guardians is complete," Agent Stephen Atkinson said, addressing reporters from several regional newspapers and local television and cable networks. "This, in no way, implies that there is any familiar relationship between the children, or that their ethnicity is the same. We will not disclose specific information about age, ethnicity, or cause of death as this information could hinder our on-going investigation were it to be made public." Agent Atkinson encouraged anyone with information that could help the investigation to please contact the police._

Jody shook her head. While she wasn't the slightest bit surprised by the sensationalized headline— _Revealed the names, my ass!_ she thought angrily—the lack of information was still frustrating. Sitting in Sioux Falls, sipping coffee in her slippers and housecoat while Dean was over four hours and 250 miles away, in the middle of a paranormal murder investigation with no authority and no backup, wasn't helping.

Bobby had done this for years, sitting in his rundown house in the middle of his junkyard, while his "boys" were out who knows where throwing themselves in harm's way day in and day out. She'd wondered how he'd handled it, how he'd been able to get through a single day without calling one of them on the phone to make sure they were all right. Maybe it was little surprise he'd drunk.

Just the thought of Bobby brought a tightness to her throat and a watery frame around her vision. She choked it down with her last mouthful of coffee and set her mug back down on the table with more force than she'd intended.

She checked a few more news sites, but found nothing but different versions of the same non-story she'd already found. Either the Feds truly were, as Dean had said, barking up the wrong tree, or they were holding their cards close to the vest, and the newspapers were all just scrambling to keep up with each other and not be outdone.

She pulled the laptop closed and pushed herself away from the table. Sammy looked up at her as she approached him, gifting her with a smile.

"Whatcha playing?" she asked as she dropped down on the end of the couch. He thrust one of the puzzle pieces up at her and Jody took it from his hand. The yellow dog looked a lot like Marjorie's Golden Retriever, Gracey. "And what's her name?"

"Him's name is… is Bonsey," Sammy answered, confirming what she already suspected. She'd been listening to him talking to himself for quite a while. "'Cuz him wikes… him wikes pizza bones."

"Pizza Bones?"

"Da part dat's too cwunchy. Dee says I can't eat da bones 'cuz I'w choke. But Bonsey… he got _biiig_ teef an' he goes _cwunchcwunchcwunchcwunch,_ an' dey's all gone."

He giggled then, that sweet sound like bubbles popping.

"Was Bonsey your dog?"

Sammy nodded absently, his attention on the black dog puzzle piece in his hand. "When I's bigger."

Jody blinked. Was he speaking about his past or his future? Or of his past as though it would be his future? "How bigger?" she asked.

Sammy shrugged. He held up both hands, the puzzle piece still held to his right palm with his ring and pinky finger. "Dis bigger." He closed his left hand and opened it again—if he'd been older, she'd have assumed he meant fifteen, or maybe thirteen if she wasn't supposed to count the fingers holding the puzzle piece.

He dropped his hands into his lap and huffed a deep sigh. "Dee says I can't keep him, 'cuz… 'cuz he'w pee in da 'Pawa an' Daddy be mad." A little V formed in the space between his eyebrows.

"Sammy? Does your head hurt?" Jody asked. She'd seen that same V on Sam's forehead on more than one occasion, and then had watched him dry-swallow a palm-full of Ibuprofen and chase it down with a mouthful of cold coffee or warm whiskey.

Sammy shook his head, though, and his skin between his brows smoothed out. He looked up at her and smiled, reaching out his hand to take the puzzle piece from her distracted fingers.

"Can we pway in da shnow?"

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

Jody had always believed that the length of time it took to properly dress a three-year-old to play outside in the snow was inversely proportional to the length of time said three-year-old would actually _stay_ outside to play before deciding it was too cold or he was hungry or had to go to the bathroom. There was probably a study out there somewhere that proved it, along with a mathematical formula that calculated, give or take a minute, the point of diminishing returns. Knowing Sam, he probably could have found that study and its formula, and done the math in his head in less time—and with less effort—than it had taken her to bundle Sammy up in his borrowed, too-big-for-him snow gear.

She wasn't really complaining. He had the sweetest, little voice—not shrill or loud—and he'd truly seemed to listen to the answers she'd given him to his many questions about what his boots were made out of and why they didn't look like the wheels on the Impala if they were made out of the same stuff and where did rubber come from anyway and could he grow a rubber tree in his sand bucket so they wouldn't have to keep buying him boots when he grew out of them and why couldn't they just make boots out of rubber bands so they'd stretch as his feet got bigger?

He'd also had a sudden inclination for hugs she hadn't been expecting. When he'd wrapped his arms around her neck and dropped his head down on her shoulder with a little happy-sounding hum as she'd pulled on his boots, it had brought a sudden lump to her throat and a sting to her eyes. Naturally, she'd hugged him back.

Mostly, she hadn't cared too much if he'd followed true to norm and wanted to go back inside within 15 minutes of coming outside, because she had to be outside the whole time, too, and it was friggin' cold.

Of course, why she should have thought that little Sammy Winchester would be a statistic she had _no_ idea.

"Are you getting cold?" she asked for the third time in the last half hour.

He shook his head. They'd already been outside for what _had_ to have been an hour and he didn't look like he was ready to go inside anytime soon.

His cheeks were rosy pink and his lips were starting to look a little blue. The snow was still too powdery for making snowballs or a snowman, though it didn't stop Sammy from trying to make clumps form in his mitted hands. Mostly, it just melted. Still, Jody had pulled out the dustpan so he could push the snow in the yard into little mounds with his "little shovel" that he then flopped down into with a squeal and a _whoosh!_ sending puffs of powder into the air around him.

Jody had lost the feeling in her fingers and her toes a while ago, and yet the idea of curbing his excitement was unthinkable. It was as if he'd never played in the snow before—or maybe, he just didn't remember ever having done it.

"You do it!" he shrieked, standing next to the latest little mound of snow—nowhere near enough to cushion her fall.

"I'm too big, Sammy," she told him. "You go ahead."

He flopped over backwards in the pile, sending another cloud of snow up in the air. It settled down on his face and he licked at the flakes that landed on his lips.

"Dee make… One time, him make dis reawwy big swide and we went down on our tummies wike penguins," he said with a giggle. He started fanning his arms and legs up and down, and in and out, making a snow angel. "Him say… if we gotta wun 'way from da bomble shnowman, we go reawwy fast."

"Wow," Jody said. What else could she say to something like that? Knowing what she knew about what they did and how long they'd been doing it—and she was beginning to think it had been far longer than she'd originally assumed—it was difficult to know how to take a comment like that. How to take many of the things he said.

How much was imagination and how much was memory? She'd been noticing the common theme behind some of what Sammy said, how everything was preceded by _Dean says_ or _Dean does_. No doubt, there was a little more than _just a little_ genuine hero-worship behind most of it: Sammy was a little brother and Dean was his big brother. It made perfect sense that he'd have looked up to Dean and hung on everything he'd said and done as a child. It was so obvious how close they were now. It only stood to reason that they'd been close as children.

Still, some of the things Sammy said threw up warning flags in her head. She'd been a law officer for a long time and maybe that had skewed the shade of her glasses just a bit, but it had also taught her to read between the lines so she'd see those flags when they went up. Dean telling Sammy to hide in the closet if the monsters came. Dean telling Sammy that he had to be quiet in the morning or the "big people" would be grumpy. Dean telling Sammy that he couldn't keep his dog because it would pee in the car—not the _house_ , but the _car!_

Any of those things taken singularly might not have done more than raise her eyebrow, but the pattern they formed should have had Family Services knocking on their door—assuming anyone in authority ever saw it. Some kids got _real_ good at hiding in plain sight, at staying down below the cracks in the systems, especially when younger siblings were involved.

It made her wonder how many of the games Dean had taught Sammy to play were _games_ and how many were to ensure they stayed below the radar and therefore together.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

It was a difficult thought to shake. Two hours later, back in the house with lunch and hot cocoa behind them, she still couldn't stop thinking about it. What kind of life had those two lived? Bobby had been as cagey on their details as he'd been on so much else. It was obvious that hunters held themselves apart from _regular_ folk, and knowing how they often had to skirt around local laws and law enforcement, she supposed she really couldn't blame them.

No local badge was going to stand idly by while two strangers dug up a body in one of their cemeteries, and salted and burned its bones.

The only things Bobby hadn't been unclear about were that the Winchesters had been hunters for a very long time, and that they had seen stuff that she could _never_ comprehend. As much as she'd wanted to drag more out of him, though, something in his eyes had had her backing off, a sadness or pain too great for even a gruff old softie like Bobby to put into words.

There was no way she could ask Sammy about these things. One, it would have been unforgivably unfair. He was so young. It didn't matter that every once and a while he'd look out of that sweet, cherubic little face with eyes that seemed centuries too old. For all intents and purposes, he was—at least at the moment—a three-year-old, and as such, he was as open and unguarded as _Sam,_ at thirty, was not. She couldn't— _wouldn't_ —take advantage.

Two, she wasn't sure it was such a good idea to try to get Sam to remember his past. Not if the little lines of pain around his eyes whenever he tried was any indication. Better that he stay in the immediate, to be the child that, she suspected, he'd never really been allowed to be the first time around.

To that end…

"So, are you going to help me?"

She stood at her kitchen table, a large mixing bowl, measuring cup and spoons, two cookie sheets, and a large mixing spoon laid out in front of her. Eggs, flour, butter, brown sugar, vanilla, and a bag of Nestles Toll House chocolate morsels were set to the side. Sammy looked up at her from the end of the table with wide, excited eyes.

"I c'n hewp?" he asked.

"Well, you didn't expect _me_ to do all the work, did you?"

He scooted around the table and stopped at her side. "Dee says I's too wittwe to hewp cut da circews."

 _Cut the…?_ "Well…" She decided to go with the safest answer. "He's absolutely right about that."

She slid the chair closer and helped Sammy climb up onto the seat. "But I can… I can put da circews on dis." He pulled one of the cookie sheets closer and patted it with his hands. He looked at the assorted bake ware and ingredients on the table, then tipped his head to one side. His little face screwed up in confusion. "Where da cookie tube?"

Jody laughed, finally understanding what "circles" he'd been talking about. "There isn't one," she explained. "We're going to make a different kind of cookie." She expected Sammy to put up a bit of a protest. She basically was suggesting that there was a different way to do something than how Dean had done it.

Sure enough, the corners of Sammy's mouth turned down a little. "Dee's kind's weawy yummy," he said, a note of skepticism in his voice. There was curiosity, too, though. He picked up the measuring spoons, studying them intently as he turned them this way and that.

"Of course, they are," she agreed. "Think yours will be just as good?"

He looked up at her. "Dey's _ours!_ "

It had been a very long time since Jody had baked cookies, and longer still since she'd last attempted to do so with a three-year-old _helping_. There was considerably more flour in Sammy's hair and on his clothes than on the counter—only because she'd been wiping up as he'd spilled—and he'd consumed more chocolate morsels than he probably should have. But the whole house smelled like Toll House Central and she had to wonder if Sammy's face hurt nearly as much as hers did from smiling so much.

It had taken them twice as long to make the dough and spoon the _wittle bawws_ onto the sheets as she remembered it _ever_ taking, and the cookies were more amoeba-shaped than round; but Sammy looked so proud of every single one. He looked over the two-dozen-or-so cookies cooling on the counter before them as though inspecting each one.

"We gives Dee dis one," he said, pointing to one of the largest cookies on the rack. "Cuz it's biggest. An' dis one cuz it's got bunches of chocowate chips. Dee wikes 'em wiff wots of chocowate chips."

She pulled down a small plate and moved the cookies Sammy had chosen onto it. "When they cool, we'll put them in a baggie to keep them fresh," she promised.

"An' we makes hot cocoa, too?" Sammy asked, looking up at her.

Figures, he'd remember that.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

She shouldn't have been surprised. On some level, deep down below where she was consciously thinking about it, she'd known it was inevitable. How could it not be, after all? The toys on the floor, the sweet chatter of a little boy's voice wafting up from the living room, a child's snowsuit, mittens, and boots drying in the hallway: any one of those things could have done it and yet, it was the Batman sippy cup in the sink that took her out at the knees.

The tears started falling before she could throw up a wall to stop them. She cursed herself. It had been so long since she'd last done this, since something had blindsided her bad enough to have her weeping into her kitchen towels. Once started, though, she wasn't sure she could stop.

It was having Sammy there. The rational side of her brain knew that. Having another little boy in her house, opening her heart to him as she had so completely—as if there had been any doubt that _that_ would happen the minute Sammy had smiled up at her—and knowing as she did how it couldn't last.

Sammy wasn't staying. What was more, if— _when_ —Dean completed whatever he needed to complete, Sammy would be _gone._ Forever. She'd _never_ see him again. She'd never see him grow. He'd just be one more child in her life who would suddenly _not_ be in her life.

A sob broke loose, and she clamped her hand over her mouth to contain the sound. Sammy was in the next room playing, happy and oblivious to the emotional landmine his presence had suddenly thrown under her feet. She couldn't let him see her like this. What would she tell him? What excuse could she possibly give him why she was suddenly crying in her kitchen over a goddamned sippy cup? How could he understand?

She swallowed; her throat was so tight it ached with the need to let her grief out, to scream and wail at the unfairness of it all.

Her son… It had been so hard the first time, watching him slip through her fingers and knowing there was nothing she could do to stop it. She didn't know how she'd survive it. If she hadn't had Sean… But then Owen had come back, through some act of _weird_ she still couldn't comprehend, only for her to have to go through it a second time.

And for it to be so, _so_ much worse…

"Dody?"

She gasped, startled. How had he moved so quickly and so quietly? She hastily wiped at her eyes and cleared her throat. "What is it, Sammy?"

Despite her best efforts, her voice wavered and hitched.

She heard the subtle slide of his socked feet on the floor as he shifted side to side, and a soft huff of air as he sighed. "You sad?"

She closed her eyes, willing her tears to stay behind her lids, trying to compose herself before she turned to face him so she wouldn't upset him. It might have been too late already. She could hear it in his voice.

"Did you… did you need something, honey?"

When no answer came, she made another swipe at her eyes then risked a glance over her shoulder. He stood with his stuffed moose clutched tight to his chest and looked down at the floor.

"Sammy?" she asked again.

He shook his head and looked up at her through his hair. His lower lip shot out a little, and she swore she could see tears pooling in his eyes.

"What's wrong?" she asked, pushing away from the counter and squatting down in front of him.

He sighed again, "You sad." It wasn't a question this time. "Dee says hugs fix sad," he uttered then. "But… mine don't work. Not on Daddy."

"Oh, sweetie." She opened her arms and drew him in, her own distress pushed down and aside in the wake of his. He dropped his head on her shoulder as her arms wrapped around him, his small body shuddering with each little sniffle.

"They'll work on me," she whispered into his hair.

"Dey will?"

Even as he asked, his voice so hopeful it started her tears flowing all over again, his little arms slid around her neck, hesitant at first, but then tightening as hers did. "Yeah. They really will. Know why?"

He shook his head, his soft hair brushing her cheek.

"'Cuz you give the best hugs."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

The rest of the afternoon was quiet, not quite subdued despite her earlier breakdown and Sammy's reaction to it, but low-key. At first, Sammy had been disinclined to do anything but sit in her lap and suck his thumb. That had actually worked very well for Jody, as she'd felt rather disinclined to have him move. They'd ended up napping at some point, Sammy asleep in her arms and she dozing lightly in the armchair. She hadn't really noticed the transition. She'd just suddenly become aware of the passage of time, and of a peacefulness that—at least in that very moment—was far more sweet than bitter.

They then played a clever game Sammy had called _Dee's Matchy Checker Game_. Dean had obviously played the game with Sammy _a lot_ for Sammy knew exactly how Jody was supposed to set up the small grid of black-suit playing cards and stack the red-suit cards that she was to then draw one by one and place face up on the table. He knelt on the floor between her legs, seeming to not want to be too far away from her—or maybe sensing that she kind of wanted him near, too—searching the grid for the card whose number matched the card she drew and covering it with a penny (it had been a long time since Jody had had checkers in her house).

For a three-year-old, Sammy's attention span was remarkable, or maybe he just _really_ liked the game. They'd already filled the grid with pennies four times, Jody rearranging the cards after each round, and he didn't seem the least bit bored.

Tired, yes.

Bored, not even close.

He yawned and rubbed at his eyes with his fist then dropped his last penny over the ten of clubs. Jody had a smile already in place when Sammy looked up at her with those lethal eyes and said, "Again?" as though he hadn't figured out already that she'd play the game with him as long as he wanted.

She gathered up the cards, shuffled them a few times, then began laying them out in the five by five grid. Sammy played with the pile of pennies, flipping them over so they were all heads up on the table.

She'd noticed that same OCD tendency in Sam on more than one occasion and had chalked it up to a need to have some order in his otherwise transient, chaotic life. Seeing it now, she couldn't help but wonder: had he always been that way, even as a small child, or was this just another piece of _Sam_ seeping into _Sammy's_ psyche?

The very possibility that _Sam_ was still in there somewhere, conscious or aware even in the smallest degree yet trapped behind the mind and body of a three-year-old was enough to make Jody's stomach twist for the both of them.

Sammy flipped the last penny over and oriented it so it was the same as all the others, heads up and right side up, and it was all Jody could do not to swipe her hand through the neat and orderly rows he'd made, because— _dammit!_ —a three-year-old shouldn't be thinking about order and structure. A three-year-old should be noise and movement and a swath of muddy footprints, sticky-finger smears, and scattered toys four feet wide.

That's how Owen had been at three, a whirlwind in Toughskins and Spiderman sneakers. He hadn't played quietly in the living room whispering to his puppy-shaped puzzle pieces that they had to _shush or go back in the box_. He didn't worry about waking the _big people_ or where to hide _when_ the monsters came.

And he certainly had never looked at Jody the way Sammy had when she'd asked him if there was a game he'd like to play; as though the very idea that she might actually _want_ to play a game with him was so unexpected, so _alien_ to him it was like the best treat _ever!_

"You ready?" she asked, and when he looked up at her with the same amazed, excited expression on his face, she decided right then and there that they could play that game all evening if that was what Sammy wanted to do.

Soon, the grid was half-filled, and Jody was beginning to think they _would_ be playing it all evening. She placed a three of hearts down on the table and Sammy reached out his hand to place his penny on the three of spades.

Only, he didn't place it. He just held it over the card, huffing out a little breath that rose and dropped his shoulders.

Suddenly, he whipped his hand back and threw his penny across the room.

"Hey!" Jody was so shocked. Before she could say anything more, though, Sammy threw himself onto the floor and started to cry.

 _Well, you_ were _just whining about his lack of typical three-year-old behavior,_ she thought. While it was strangely reassuring to see, it was unnerving, too.

"Hey," she said again, this time trying to soothe him. She dropped her cards onto the table and reached down to him. She expected him to scream out and push her away, maybe even kick at the table or her legs. With all he'd been through, he was entitled to a little tantrum. She was kind of surprised he hadn't thrown one sooner.

He did none of those things though. He just continued to press his face into the floor and cry. Her hands slid around his shoulders and under his arms, and when she started to lift him off the floor, he pushed himself up and into her arms, wrapping his arms around her neck.

She held him close, her hand buried in his soft sable hair. "What's the matter, sweetie?"

"Want Dee!" he wailed into her shoulder.

"I know, honey."

"When he comin' back?"

He sounded every bit as distraught as he'd sounded when Dean had first left, and she didn't know what to tell him any more now than she had then. Most children didn't understand concepts like _later_ or _soon_. Even _tomorrow_ was a stretch. While Sammy wasn't _most_ children, those concepts still seemed unfathomable to him. How could they not with the way _past_ and _present_ seemed all jumbled up in his head?

Then there was the fear of making a promise she couldn't keep, of telling him something that gave him hope and an expectation that she could no more predict than guarantee. All she could say was, "I don't know," which only made him cry harder until he was gasping and choking between sobs and she really began to fear he might make himself sick.

Then Sammy said, "Wha'f he don't come back?" and the words she'd tried so hard not the say just slipped out.

"Of course, he'll come back."

It was too late to take them back. She felt Sammy nod his head and her heart sank a little. He believed her.

 _Dean, so help me. You had better not make a liar outta me._

That evening, Dean didn't call.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	6. Chapter 6

**~~~~~Chapter 6~~~~~**

( _Sunday 8:00PM_ )

"Dis is fwee," Sammy said as he settled into the bed. He clutched his stuffed tiger close to his chin and looked up at Jody through red-rimmed eyes. She'd managed to calm him down enough to get a few bites of dinner into him without him choking, but the tears had never really stopped. There had been lulls, short moments when he'd fallen silent, but they'd been few and far between.

Of course, every minute that had ticked by with still no call hadn't helped. Sammy was an observant child, and Jody's nerves were fraying. She'd tried not to let her mounting concern show on her face, but she knew she'd failed miserably. So many times, she'd reached for her phone fully intending to call Dean's number only to check herself. She'd worked enough investigations to know how catastrophic it could be for him were his phone to start ringing at a moment when stealth was necessary.

Jody sat on the edge of Sammy's bed and stroked her fingers through his hair. "What's free, Sammy?"

He huffed in frustration, his eyes filling with tears yet again. "It's _fwee!_ " he cried holding up three fingers for her to see.

"Okay, okay!" she said, wondering if she was _ever_ going to get him to calm down enough to fall asleep. "What's three?"

"I—I sweep here fwee times," as though _that_ was supposed to make any sense to her. "Daddy says after fwee times Dee 'posta caww Uncle Bobby or Passa Jim."

"After three times?" That sick feeling was twisting her gut again. "You mean after three nights?" Surely he didn't mean…

He nodded, sniffing loudly. "We—we not 'posta stay wonger, or—or da 'forties come an'—an' dey take me away."

 _Authorities?_ He did mean… "Oh God," she breathed. All those questions that had been rattling around in her head for the last few days, about their childhood, about the life they had led and the things they had experienced; they just screamed louder. And everything he was saying was just making them harder to keep behind her teeth.

The law officer in her wanted answers. She _was_ the authority who might have come and taken Sammy away had she discovered them alone and without supervision. The idea that he might have feared her in that instant instead of trusting her like he seemed to now was enough to break her heart.

She wanted to ask him, but she knew it would only upset him more. Besides, it was his past. He might be only three at the moment, but whatever neglect or danger or hard times he might have faced as a child had happened to him over twenty-five years ago. It was over, and there was nothing she could do to save him from it, or to stop it or to influence any part of it.

She mustered a smile for him and could only hope it was reassuring. "No one is going to come and take you away if you stay here."

He didn't seem convinced. "But—but Daddy says…"

"Hey. Dean brought you here, right? And he asked me to take care of you until he got back. That means he wants you to stay _here_. So, see? You don't have to go anywhere."

"An' Daddy won't get mad?"

"No, he won't, honey. I promise."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

The sound was shrill and sudden, yanking Jody out of her sound sleep and sending her scrambling across her bed for her cell phone. Except, it hadn't come from her cell phone. She stared stupidly at the darkened screen as though it were somehow at fault, then looked over at the 3:38 shining dimly from her alarm clock. Had she been dreaming and she'd only imagined that sound?

The doubt had no time to root. She heard it again, high and loud despite being muffled through the wall. It was the sound of a child _screaming_.

 _Sammy!_

She tore from her bed and rushed from her room, not caring—or even acknowledging—that her door had slammed hard enough into the wall to dent the plaster. By the time she reached Sammy's bedroom door, the scream had become a wail; high-pitched, continuous, and filled with such blood-curdling terror, it nearly froze her hand on the doorknob.

What the hell was she going to walk in on, unarmed and unprepared?

She pushed that thought aside and barged into the room. A quick scan showed her the room was empty; no lurking and menacing form—incorporeal or otherwise (she knew enough to know not everything those boys hunted had a tangible body) hulked within. At least, none that she could see.

And yet, that terrible sound continued. She immediately turned to the bed…

…just as Sammy tumbled to the floor in a frantic tangle of blankets and flailing arms and legs. She cringed at the thump his head made as it collided with the leg of the bed, but filed that away as a secondary concern at the moment. He certainly hadn't hit his head hard enough to snap him out of his terror. It was doubtful he'd felt the impact at all, so buried was he beneath his blankets.

"Sammy!" she called out, speaking loudly to be heard over his cries. "Sweetie, hey! Sshh. It's okay, sweetie." She continued the litany as she slowly approached him, her hands out and ready to catch him if he suddenly broke free of the blankets that were effectively holding him trapped—if not entirely immobile—on the floor.

"You're okay, honey. Sshh…" Her hand landed on what she could only assume was his leg and he yanked it away, scurrying back until he hit the wall behind him.

His head suddenly poked free of the blankets and his eyes shot up. For one second, she thought he recognized her; but then his gaze swung higher, fixing on something over her shoulder—or was it on the ceiling above her—with a look of such terror she swung around to look for herself.

There was nothing there. Not so much as a water stain for his vivid imagination to twist into something more sinister. She turned back to him. She knew enough about night terrors to know that it was usually better to let it run its course, that trying to wake him in the middle of it might only serve to frighten him further. But no way was she going to sit there and watch him scream.

She settled herself on the floor beside him and drew him into her arms, cupping her hand behind his head to prevent any further impacts with the furniture or the wall—or her dental work. He went rigid in her arms, his whole body seizing mid-gasp. The sudden silence felt as weighted as the eye of a storm, the air around her crackling with the anticipation of its inevitable return.

"Sammy, honey. It's me. It's Jody," she said quickly into that split-second lull, hoping he'd hear her through his fear and understand. "You're okay, sweetie. Sshh… It's okay. It's okay."

The tempest resumed, but it seemed to be lessening. Either he was weakening or he was waking, Jody wasn't sure which; or maybe he was merely responding to the security of her arms around his trembling body and the sound of her heartbeat in his ear.

And maybe that was wishful thinking on her part. Just a little bit.

Whatever the case, his screaming was shifting into crying, and instead of trying to squirm away from her his little fingers were clutching at her t-shirt through the blanket. She kept up her reassurances, "You're safe. It's okay, sweetie; I'm here. Sshh… It was just a bad dream." Rocking him back and forth was the most natural thing in the world, and even as he began to settle in her arms, his sobs fading into the occasion little hiccup, she continued to hold him, running her fingers through his hair and rubbing his back.

When he went still, she drew back just enough to see his face. She expected him to be sleeping but his eyes were open. He blinked up at her and she could see the lingering fear. Any hope she'd had that it had been night terrors and nothing that he would even remember come morning vanished.

He remembered.

"That must have been a really bad dream, huh?" she said calmly.

His breath hitched in his chest and his lower lip quivered, but he only nodded.

"Wanna tell me about it?"

Again, his eyes shifted to the ceiling over his bed as though he expected something terrible to be there. His fingers tightened in the blanket. "Dere… I saw a fire," he whispered. "An'… an' she was weawwy scared."

"Who was scared, honey?"

"The girw in da fire."

Before she could even articulate a response to that he asked, "Is Dee hewe?"

She lifted him up onto her lap and wrapped her arms around him, laying her cheek against his soft, messy hair. "No, honey; he's not."

"He mad at me?"

She drew back in surprise at the question and looked down at him. "Of course, not. Why would he be mad at you?"

One little shoulder jerked up in a lop-sided shrug. "'Cuz I did bad tings."

 _Bad things?_ A cold dread settled into Jody's stomach. She knew that Sammy was remembering things strangely, that his distant and recent pasts were all mashing together into one confusing mess. What he'd dreamed, was that a memory or simply the product of an adult's lifetime's worth of strange crap being processed through the active imagination of a child too innocent to understand what he was seeing? Who was the girl in the fire, and why did he see her when he looked up at the ceiling and not out across the room?

More importantly, what could he possibly think he could have done that was _bad_ enough for Dean to leave him?

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

The fever came on shortly after breakfast—not that she'd been able to get him to eat more than a few bites of toast and a few sips of juice, hardly enough to call a meal. He'd gone straight into the living room after asking to be excused, and he'd crawled up onto the couch with his stuffed tiger clutched in one hand and the thread-worn army blanket in the other. Somehow, he'd managed to get his thumb in his mouth without letting go of either.

She'd tried to engage him a few times, with offers to play a game or to read him a story, but he'd just shook his head and huddled deeper into his blanket. He hadn't felt warm when Jody had caressed his cheek with the back of her hand, so she'd left him alone while she'd cleaned up breakfast.

By the time she'd returned, however, not even fifteen minutes later, there had been a slight flush to his cheeks. When she'd touched the back of her fingers and then the inside of her arm to his forehead, he'd felt noticeably warmer.

She'd fished Children's Tylenol out of his duffel bag, and the box of disposable forehead thermometer strips she hadn't noticed before; all the while deciding she should give Dean Winchester a big smooch for being such an over-protective, mother-hen where Sammy was concerned.

She was still going to strangle him for making her toss and turn all night long, wondering and worrying and imagining all sorts of dire reasons why he hadn't called her in over 24 hours.

She'd dosed Sammy up over an hour ago, but his temperature hadn't dropped. It hadn't gone up, either, so at least there was that. It hovered at 101.1 degrees, give or take that point one degree, leaving him lethargic and quiet for most of the morning.

Jody paced between her kitchen and her living room, her stomach so tied up in knots she wasn't sure she wasn't going to be sick. She told herself it was just stress, that his sudden fever was simply the result of his distress over the terrible nightmare he'd had coupled with his sadness because he missed his big brother, and not something more…supernatural. The truth was, it was scaring the hell out of her.

Owen's fever had started the same way, seemingly out of nowhere. Sure, she knew he shouldn't have been there in the first place, that nothing _natural_ had brought him back into her life, but that was only making this worse. Sammy wasn't there by any _natural_ means either. Something unnatural had brought Sammy there. Was it going the take him away?

Was she going to have to go through this again?

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

By the time Jody's cell phone rang, Sammy's fever had eked up to 102 degrees despite a second dose of Tylenol, and her nerves were well and truly shot to hell. She lunged for her phone, nearly knocking the lamp off the end table in her haste. She speared a glance at the screen and her relief punched out of her.

"'Bout damn time!" she barked into the receiver. Sammy stirred slightly where he lay sleeping on the couch with his head in her lap, but he didn't wake.

There was silence on the other end, not even the subtle sound of breathing. Just as she was about the call out his name…

 _"We got 'im,"_ Dean said. His voice sounded raspy, though she couldn't tell if it was due to exhaustion or injury. _"We got the sonuvabitch!"_

The news should have been welcome. And it was, of course, deep down below that place where her worry and her helplessness had been sinking its roots into her gut. Higher up, though, closer to the surface it warred with other emotions, ones she didn't want to admit she had.

She pushed them away, swallowing against a tightness in her throat she flat out refused to acknowledge. The hand not holding the cell phone went to her lap, her fingers drifting through the soft, fever-damp curls behind Sammy's ear.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "What happened?"

 _"How's Sammy doin'?"_ Dean asked instead.

The urgency in his voice ratcheted her worry up another notch. "He spiked a fever a few hours ago."

 _"How high is it? Is he okay?"_

"About 102 last I checked," she answered. "I've been giving him the Tylenol and he seems to be doing all right. Dean, what's going on?"

 _"I'm about 3 hours away."_

It was as if they were having two different conversations, each one equally as important and urgent as the other. "Dean!" she said exasperated, trying to rein him into answering one of _her_ damn questions.

Sammy flinched at the sound, curling in a little tighter and whimpering softly. She cringed. She caressed his hair hoping to soothe him back to sleep. Dean sounded a little on edge, and if he was three hours away that meant he was driving. The last thing he needed to hear at that moment was Sammy in distress.

The sound of Dean sighing heavily filtered through the tiny microphone. _"We found the last two victims,"_ he said tiredly. _"At least, we're assuming the two kids we found are our two missing persons. They were both in some kind of… I don't know. Doc said it's not a coma, but they were more than just unconscious. They didn't respond when we tried to wake them. And their core temperatures were so high she didn't know how they weren't having seizures."_

"Wait. You don't… Do you think Sammy's fever is related?"

 _"I don't know. Maybe. God, I hope not. The two kids we found, they had these symbols painted on their chests. Right over the place where the other kids had that puncture hole."_

The other kids.

The ones who'd died. He hadn't said it, but Jody could hear it in his voice, his words laced heavily with frustration and regret and guilt.

 _"Doc said it was blood,"_ he continued, and disgust joined those other overtones in his voice.

"Animal?" she asked, hopefully.

His snort was harsh and cold. _"You wish. Most likely his."_

She suspected as much, but it still turned her stomach to have it confirmed.

 _"I'm guessing that's how he was draining them,"_ Dean continued. _"His blood and that symbol on their chests made a link between him and them; an' then like sticking a tube in a gas tank, he just syphoned the life right outta them."_

"And the puncture wounds?"

 _"Severed the link when he was done draining them. Doc said the wounds were post-mortem."_ He made that same cruel sound again. _"Small mercy, there."_

Jody looked down at Sammy's fever-flushed face. He'd been sleeping deeply since his last dose of Tylenol, and that small V between his eyebrows, an indication of pain or distress, hadn't changed in all that time. The more she thought about it, it had been there since he'd woken up, several hours before his temperature had started to rise.

"If this guy needed to mark that symbol on his victims with his blood in order to affect them..." she started, thinking out loud. "Dean, if Sammy doesn't have that mark on him, then there couldn't be a link between them, right? How could his fever be related?"

 _"Why else would he have one?"_ he answered impatiently.

"Oh, I don't know. Because he's only three years old and he's stressed." She mentally kicked herself as soon as the words left her mouth. She hadn't wanted to tell him about the rough time he'd been having since yesterday afternoon: his distress over her little meltdown—she was still kicking herself for that—and again when Dean hadn't called; his worry about having to leave her house because he'd reached the magic third night in the same place and if he stayed any longer the authorities would come; his terrible nightmare of a girl burning in a fire, a fire he seemed to associate with his ceiling, of all places; and his fear that Dean wouldn't be coming back because he had done something so terrible that Dean now hated him.

That was a lot of shit for any toddler to handle, let alone one as sensitive and hyper-aware as Sammy. She'd have been more concerned if the stress _wasn't_ getting to him. It was starting to get to her and she was an adult, for crying out loud.

No, she couldn't tell him any of this, not now, anyway, when he was driving and no doubt already committing more than a few moving vehicle violations to get back to his brother. He already sounded on edge, that same frantic tone in his voice as he'd had when he'd first called her three days ago and asked for her help.

Had it already been _three days_?

 _"Stressed?"_ Dean repeated. _"Did something happen?"_

"Shit," she uttered under her breath.

 _"Jody!"_

"Dean!" she snapped back, exasperated.

Sammy stirred in her lap, his little fist eking out of the blanket to grind at his eyes. "Dee?" he uttered, blinking up at her through dark, glassy eyes. His thumb worked its way into his mouth.

 _"Dammit, Jody!"_

She pulled the phone back from her ear with a wince, and Sammy yanked his thumb out of his mouth with a little pop. Hope flared in his eyes. It was such a sweet thing to see after looking at his despondent, withdrawn expression all morning.

 _"Jody, what the—!"_

She gave Sammy a smile and said into her phone, "Can you pull over?"

 _"WHAT?"_

"Sammy's awake. I'll let you talk to him, but only if you pull over first."

 _"Oh, for the love of— Fine!"_

She could hear him swearing and griping, but little else to indicate he was doing as she'd asked. In truth, she really wasn't paying attention to Dean at that moment. Sammy pushed himself up in her lap, his stuffed tiger clutched tightly in his hand. (He'd wanted nothing to do with his stuffed moose since waking up, had all but screamed at the sight of it. She'd stuffed the thing into the very bottom of his duffle bag and had zipped the bag shut.)

"Guess who's on the phone," she said to him. She settled him into her lap and tucked the old army blanket around his body. She could still feel the heat coming off him and would have preferred he _not_ be all bundled up, but Sammy wanted the blanket around him, seemed to shiver and curl into a tighter ball as though he was cold whenever she tried to remove it.

"Dee?"

She nodded and put the phone close to her mouth. "Think you can maintain a G rating there, Winchester?" Dean fell silent in her ear. She pulled the phone back and hit the speaker button, then handed the phone to Sammy.

He looked from the phone to Jody and back again, unsure and maybe a little afraid. "Dee?" he said, finally.

 _"Sammy?"_ came Dean's immediate response.

"Dee!" Sammy grabbed Jody's hand, pulling the phone closer to his face.

 _"Hey, buddy. Jody says you're not feelin' too hot, right now."_

Sammy's head tipped to the side in confusion. "I feew _weawwy_ hot," he answered.

Dean chuckled, though Jody could hear the strain of it, the worry Dean was trying so hard to hide. _"Right. What's goin' on?"_

Sammy made a little sound—the classic tonal _I don't know_ —and shrugged his little shoulders. "Are you comin' home," he asked instead, his voice small and distraught. "Cuz… you been gone forever."

Tears welled in his eyes and his lower lip jutted out in a heartbreaking little pout. Jody was glad Dean couldn't see his distress. It would have gutted him where he sat, still so far away. She'd thought Sammy had understood why Dean had had to leave.

 _He gonna go catch da bad guy_.

She should have realized; although he may have understood _why_ , he hadn't understood how long it would take.

 _"Aw, come on, Sammy. It hasn't been_ that _long."_

"Ah-huh." he argued. "I sweep here fwee times. Now, Daddy gonna be mad."

 _"What?"_

"Daddy gonna be mad cuz… cuz we di'n't caw Bobby wike we 'posed to. But Dody say… Dody say I di'n't have to. Dat I could stay here. An' I wike it here, but… but I want you… want you t'come home, now."

At times, the words were so tangled up in his sobs and hitching gasps that Jody could barely understand them. She tried to stem the flow, rubbing her hand in small circles on his back to soothe and calm him. She could hear Dean trying, with little success, to do the same with words; the only thing he could offer in the way of comfort from so far away, but Sammy wouldn't be mollified. He clutched at the phone in Jody's hand, his fingers cold despite the heat radiating off his small body.

" _Sammy, STOP!"_ Dean snapped. Sammy jumped in Jody's lap. She nearly jumped herself, but Sammy fell silent. " _Now, you listen to me, okay. D—Dad won't be mad. He won't! I promise you. And I'm coming home, right now."_

"You are?"

" _Yup, I'll be there before supper, and I'm starving so you better help Jody make something good, ya hear?"_

Sammy nodded. "Dis mean…dis mean you not mad at me no more?"

"Oh, Sammy," Jody sighed.

" _Mad at you? Sammy, what a'ya talkin' about? I'm not… Why would I be mad at you, buddy? C'mon."_

"See, honey," Jody said dipping her head so she could see his face. "I told you he wasn't mad."

But Sammy just shook his head, his little mouth twisting into a stubborn line. "But he was. He was. He was so mad at me. An' I said, I sowwy, but… he di'n't bewieve me. But I was!"

" _Jody, what the hell?_ " Dean uttered.

As if she had the answer to that question. As if she could have so much as hazarded a guess. There were over thirty years of memories trapped in that little mind, and some of them, she suspected, were damn horrible. If Dean couldn't pinpoint the exact incident Sammy was alluding to, she sure as hell wasn't going to be able to. For all she knew, it could have been several incidents all blurring into one, something that had happened days before his transformation that was so unimportant now, or something that had happened so long ago that neither Dean, nor Sam under normal circumstances, would have recalled it at all. All she could do was try to redirect the conversation away from that minefield and onto safer ground.

"Okay," she said, tipping Sammy's face up to hers. "But he's not anymore, right, Dean?"

" _Of course, not! You and me, Sammy? Remember?_ "

Sammy sniffed loudly, but he nodded. "'Gainst da wowld."

" _Damn straight!_ " Dean declared.

Under the circumstance, Jody wasn't going to give him grief for the language. She wiped at Sammy's tears with the corner of the blanket and gave him a reassuring smile. "So, what do you say we let Dean go for now?" Sammy started to shake his head, but Jody plowed on before he could get too worked up again. "The sooner he gets back on the road, the sooner he can get here, right? And, while we're waiting, _we_ can see what we can make for dinner to surprise him when he gets here. Okay?"

There was silence on both sides of the call: from Sammy, who clutched at the phone as though it was his big brother's coattail, and from Dean, who seemed to be holding his breath in dread.

" _C'mon, Sammy,_ " Dean said finally. " _Sure sounds like a good plan to me._ "

Dean's endorsement was all Sammy needed to hear. He nodded his head, "'Kay."

Jody kissed Sammy's head as Dean's voice came up from the phone in her hand, " _That's my boy."_ A small smile appeared on Sammy's face at the praise. " _How 'bout lettin' me talk to Jody now?"_

For a second, Jody feared Sammy was going to start crying again. That little V appeared between his brows, so similar to the one that indicated pain, but different. It was subtle, but she was learning to read that expressive little face. He was distressed, perhaps even contemplating rearing that formidable stubborn streak that was considerably cuter on Sammy than it was on Sam. Admittedly, it was less intimidating when coming from something that stood only knee high.

But Sammy sighed, an adorable little huff of temper. "Bye," he said. If he was trying to make Dean feel guilty, it was an impressive attempt.

" _I'll see you soon, buddy._ "

Apparently, it had worked, too.

Jody shifted Sammy onto the couch and rose to her feet, thumbing the speaker off. "You okay?" she asked Dean, even though she knew he wasn't. That couldn't have been easy for him to hear. It hadn't been easy for her to watch, and Sammy's misery hadn't been directed at her.

" _Not particularly,_ " he answered. " _Seriously, what the hell was that all about?_ "

She stepped away from the couch, putting a little distance between Sammy and her conversation. "I told you, he's a little stressed right now. I wouldn't put too much stock in what he said. You said yourself that he's remembering things all out of order."

" _What aren't you telling me?_ "

"Nothing that can't wait until you get here," she answered, exercising a little stubborn streak of her own.

" _Jody._ "

"The best thing for him is for you to get your ass back here, in one piece, and preferably without a police cavalcade from five counties chasing you up to my doorstep."

His sigh was loud through the tiny speaker, equal parts frustration, anger, and worry. " _Fine, just…_ "

"Watch him, I know. I am." She hoped he didn't hear the _but._ If Sammy's fever _was_ related—and she really didn't think it was: how could it be?—there wasn't a whole hell of a lot she was going to be able to do if it got worse. Dean was probably thinking the same thing, but if by some miracle he wasn't, she sure wasn't going to put that burr in his britches and then make him sit on it for the next three hours. "Now," she said instead, "how does baked macaroni sound?"

" _I wouldn't know,_ " he answered with a tired-sounding chuckle _. "I've never heard it."_

"Smart ass. Just get here."

" _Yes, Ma'am."_

She was just about to hang up, when Dean said, " _Fair warning: if it doesn't come in a blue box, Sammy won't eat it."_

"We'll see about that."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

Jody couldn't say what she _had_ expected to happen. She knew what she had _wanted_ to happen, but she certainly hadn't _expected_ that simply hearing Dean's voice tell him he was coming _home_ was going to have any effect on Sammy's fever whatsoever. Still, she was disappointed when, an hour later, his fever was still hovering around that 102-degree mark; so maybe, deep down, she'd let herself _hope_ that it might.

It was stupid and very out of character for her. A lot of the things bouncing around her head these last few days were out of character for her, if she was going to be terribly honest with herself. Or, maybe they were just out of character with who she'd had to become.

She didn't want to analyze that too much. She'd done what she'd had to do to continue to function, so she could continue to be a fraction of what she had been before _crazy_ had come into her life to shake her foundation like a dog with a rag in its mouth. It was as simple as that, and she didn't condemn herself for any of it. What would be the point?

She'd hardened her heart a little, and then a little more. The first date she'd allowed herself in years had turned out to be a friggin' demon with an axe to grind, for crying out loud! Damned straight, she'd thrown up a few more walls. As _disastrous-attempts-to-put-oneself-back-out-there_ went, coughing up blood on the floor of a restaurant bathroom because a demon-of-a-blind-date stuffed a hex bag in her purse was pretty damned hard to top.

She could have stuffed what was left of her battered heart in an ironclad box and buried it down deep, but she hadn't. Maybe, she should have. Maybe, it wouldn't be so tight in her chest right now.

Then again, she had a feeling that there wasn't a box ironclad enough to have prevailed against the Brothers Winchester. No matter how much they were tied up in the _crazy_ in her life. Even if she had been made of sterner stuff, there was _no way_ it would have prevailed against that little boy sleeping on her couch, or against that desperate _big brother_ who was speeding back to take him away.

There was just something so… so… heartbreakingly _fragile_ about them. Despite all the gruffness and hard edges and the guns and knives and dark clouds of doom, there hung about them this little-boys-lost kind of air. It dug its hooks in, triggering every _mommy_ button she had—and she'd thought those had all seized up. She'd kidded herself, she realized that now, kidded herself that it was the law officer in her, that ingrained need/desire/nature/whatever to protect and serve, but it wasn't just that.

If she had ever seen two more self-sufficient and resourceful, grown men _more_ in need of someone— _anyone—_ to take care of them, she couldn't remember when.

Sammy made a small sound. She shook off her distraction, realized she'd been standing there just watching him sleep for several minutes, and went to check on him. His eyes were open and fixed on the front door. He blinked lazily, barely acknowledging her.

She laid the back of her fingers on his forehead. He was still warm, but maybe a little cooler than he'd been. "How are you feeling?" she asked him. It was more to engage him than anything else that she asked, so the little shrug was acceptable.

"Is Dee here?" he asked.

"Not yet, sweetie. But he's on his way."

His sigh lifted and dropped his whole body. "Takes so wong."

She smiled, running her fingers through his hair. "It feels that way, huh?"

He nodded.

Funny how relative time could be. _You been gone forever!_ For him, the last three days had seemed endless. For her… She had to keep reminding herself what day it was, that _three days_ had passed since Dean had called her, since he'd shown up on her doorstep with this little boy bundled in his arms and had asked her to look out for him. The time had flown by for her, yesterday and the day before seeming like a blur. The hour since Dean had called to say he was on his way back had seemed like minutes on a fast-moving clock. She wished that she could slow the hands; that she could prolong this time just a little longer. She wasn't ready for it to end.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	7. Chapter 7

**~~~~~Chapter 7~~~~~**

( _Monday 4:10PM_ )

The house smelled like warm bread and melted cheese. Normally, that would have been as comforting as a fleece blanket over flannel pajamas on a cold March afternoon. And cold it was. The temperatures had dropped to a whopping 16 degrees, with a wind chill that was doing its best to make that feel balmy. The weather stations had been teasing snow all morning as if it were a trailer for a blockbuster movie, but were cagey about when and how much as though afraid to give away the big reveal and spoil the show.

Jody sat on the couch with Sammy in her lap. The clock on the mantel ticked away steadily, each little click sounding louder than the one before until she was tempted to toss the damn thing out the front door. She'd have done it, but Sammy was watching it, his lack-luster eyes swinging between it and the front door and back.

Even sick, Sammy was one smart cookie. He knew how to count to three on his fingers. He couldn't tell time, but he understood what the hands meant and how they interacted with each other, how the skinny red hand whizzed around the dial, pulling the long black hand one notch after every cycle, and how the short black hand only moved to the next number after the long hand had gone all the way around. He'd asked Jody how long until Dean would be home, insistent on a number instead of _soon_ or _before supper_ or any other vague answer she'd tried to give him, and he had been watching that clock ever since. He seemed to be feeling better, though his fever wasn't improving, so maybe it _was_ helping him to see those hands eke along toward 4:30.

She hoped Dean hadn't needed to stop for more than just gas along the way, because she'd only been able to pad him so much.

At 4:10, she heard a low rumble from outside. It could have been the wind. It had been picking up as evening approached, whooshing through the trees like scaled-down diesel trains. Sammy's head shot up, and she knew.

"Dee!"

Figures he'd know the sound of that car. He probably knew it in his very bones. He pushed the army blanket aside, scrambling to untangle himself from it so he could get down and run to the door. Jody scooped him up, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders and under his legs.

"It's cold outside," she explained as she tucked him in and carried him to the front window.

"An' I been sick," he replied as though finishing her sentence.

"You're _still_ sick, kiddo."

"Dee make me aww better now."

The confidence in that statement, the sheer faith he had in his big brother's ability to fix any and every hurt or ailment or problem, was humbling. She wondered if Dean had had to live up to that expectation his whole life. It seemed as though he had, that maybe he'd wanted that responsibility and had placed it on his own shoulders.

 _What do I always tell you?_

 _Nothing bad is gonna happen as long as you're around._

What kind of pressure did that put on a person? What happened when he couldn't live up to it?

The rumbling grew louder, and as they watched, the sleek, black car came into view, salt-stained and mud-splattered.

"Dee!" Sammy shrieked excitedly, showing the most animation and energy he'd shown all day. "Dody, Dee's home!"

He threw his arms around her neck and hugged her so hard, his head dug into her jawbone. She hugged him back and told herself that the tears she could feel stinging behind her closed eyelids were tears of joy because he was so happy.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~SPN~~~~~_

The car wasn't in her driveway ten seconds before the driver's side door creaked open. Dean was much slower to emerge, moving stiffly and carefully as he pulled himself out of the car and pushed the door closed. Jody immediately started triaging, her worry warring with annoyance that he'd said nothing about being injured. He walked slightly hunched over, one hand wrapped around his ribs and the other clutching his coat closed at his throat. He dipped his head against the icy wind and walked quickly—as quick as one could walk when one was clearly in pain—to her door taking the most direct route even though it meant traipsing through the snow instead of circling the extra two yards to take the walk.

He mounted her steps and she opened the door to him stomping the snow from his boots and the hem of his jeans. Sammy squirmed in her arms, eager to get to Dean the very second he stepped through the door.

"Easy, Sammy." Jody shifted him onto her hip to get a better hold on him. "Let him come in and take his coat off first."

Dean lifted his head and reached out for the storm door. He looked exhausted, dark rings under his eyes. If he'd shaved once since Friday, she'd eat her badge. The urge to get the name of the ME he'd been working with and give her a piece of her mind for letting him drive in his condition was almost overwhelming.

She held the storm door open, stepping aside so Dean could drag himself up and over the threshold. "How bad is it?" she asked.

"Look that good, do I?" he remarked. He sounded exhausted, too, his voice rougher than usual. He shrugged his coat off one arm—the one _not_ wrapped around his middle—then carefully reached across his chest to peel it off the other. A small grunt of pain escaped him as the coat cleared his elbow, but Jody had no time to ask him about it. He looked up at Sammy and the smile that spread across his face wiped nearly 200 miles of exhaustion off his face.

"Hey, buddy!" He reached out both hands to his brother and Sammy launched himself into Dean's arms before either of them was really ready.

"Dee!"

Dean staggered back a step under the sudden weight of that tiny body, another grunt—this one considerably louder and more pain-filled than the first—punching out of him. Jody noticed his face lose a shade or two. "Whoa! Go easy on me, Tiger," he said. Still, he pulled Sammy in close, letting him wrap his little arms and legs around him in a chokehold that would have made a WWF champion turn blue. He closed his eyes and just held him as if he'd thought he might never see him again.

Jody pushed the door close behind them.

Sammy was shrieking a steady stream of _DeeDeeDeeDee_ that was quickly escalating into all-out crying. He clung to him tightly, would have burrowed himself into Dean's shirt if not for the tight hold Dean had on him, too. Jody reached out to take him back. It couldn't have been doing Dean's injury—injuries?—any good, but Dean shook his head.

"It's okay," he told her. "Really." To prove his point, he gave Sammy a little bounce, then leaned him back a bit so he could see his face. "Dude, you better not be blowin' snot bubbles all over my favorite shirt."

Sammy giggled. And, just like that, the crying stopped.

It took some doing, but Dean managed to toe off his snow-wet boots without falling over. He padded over to the couch on stocking feet and set Sammy down on the cushion before lowering himself gingerly beside him. Sammy immediately climbed back into his lap, dropped his head against Dean's chest, and popped his thumb into his mouth.

"Still not feeling too good?" Dean asked.

Sammy shook his head. "'M hot," he said around the digit.

Dean pressed his knuckles to Sammy's forehead and scowled. He looked up a Jody. "No change?"

"Not really," she answered. "He's been quiet most of the day. Tylenol's been doing the rest." She looked at the clock on the mantel, not that she didn't know exactly what time it was. "He's due for another dose soon.

He just nodded. "Hey, Sammy. Ya mind me takin' a look at you?"

He really didn't wait for an answer, though Jody doubted Sammy would have refused anything Dean had asked of him at that moment—well, except something that might mean leaving Dean's side. Pushing aside the army blanket, Dean lifted Sammy's shirt to reveal his chest.

His smooth, unmarked chest. No sigil. Not even so much as a rash. They both let out a deep sigh of relief.

"No tickew," Sammy said with a little pout.

"Not even a little one?" Dean teased, but he only walked his fingers up Sammy's sternum, then tapped him on the nose. Sammy giggled.

Jody was going to miss that sound.

Shirt back in place, Sammy scooted back into Dean's lap, clutching his tiger and the army blanket in one arm—the arm attached to the thumb in his mouth—and the chest pocket of Dean's shirt in the other. Once again, Dean flinched, barely biting off another grunt of pain.

"Dammit, Winchester," Jody hissed under her breath.

"What?"

He wasn't fooling anyone. Jody gave him a withering look. She'd had hardened criminals quail under that look, but Dean Winchester just gave her back his best butter-wouldn't-melt smirk and shrugged his shoulder.

Then, clearly, wished he hadn't.

She folded her arms in from of her chest and called his bluff. "That would be more convincing if you weren't turning green."

Okay, so he wasn't turning green. He was more the color of watered-down milk, but close enough. He was clearly in pain and trying—unsuccessfully—to hide it.

"It's nuthin'," Dean said.

"You're a terrible liar."

"Hey! I'm a fan _tastic_ liar."

She'd forgotten just how infuriating he could be. "Did you even let the good doctor take a look at that _nuthin'_ before you tore outta there, or are she and I gonna have to have a few words?"

"Be my guest. She should be calling with an update in an hour or two."

He gave her a meaningful look; though Jody wasn't sure he'd meant to or even realized he'd given himself away. It wasn't too hard for her to guess what he wasn't saying: he was more _hopeful_ his ME friend in Nebraska would be calling with an update—preferably a favorable one—than he was _convinced_ that an update would be forthcoming at all. Were they in a waiting game, then, helpless to do anything but monitor the victims' stats and hope they improved, that whatever spell had been cast on them simply wore off now that the caster was gone?

She assumed he was gone, but Dean hadn't been specific. He'd merely said that they'd 'got the sonuvabitch'. Did that mean he was still alive? What did one do with such a person? It wasn't as if the law would recognize the supernatural threat behind the mundane one. Most likely, they'd only see a nut-job who'd spent too much time in his mother's basement playing World of Warcraft and now couldn't separate reality from fantasy. They wouldn't see a witch who'd been turning men into children and living off their stolen life force. They'd see a delusional psychopathic serial killer who _thought_ he was a witch.

"So, what now?" she asked, because it was all she _could_ ask.

Dean made a face that Jody could only translate as a shoulder-less shrug. "Now? I could really use a shower, a drink, a heapin' plate of whatever you got bakin' in the oven that smells so damn good, and to sleep for a week. Not, necessarily, in that order."

Jody sighed. "Yeah? Well, that's how you're getting them." She walked over and scooped Sammy up out of his lap. "C'mere, sweetie. Wha'diya say you let Dean get cleaned up while _we_ make him some of that hot cocoa?"

"Wiff the big, huge-mongus mawshmawwows?" Sammy asked, his fever-bright eyes wide with excitement.

"Of course." She tossed a wicked smirk over her shoulder as Sammy wrapped himself around her body like a spider monkey. Damn, she was going to miss that, too. "Towels are in the cabinet under the sink." 

_~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

Forty-five minutes later, Dean appeared in the kitchen looking considerably better than when he'd first arrived. His hair was still damp from the shower, sticking up in disorderly spikes as though he'd simply run a towel over the hop of his head. He was still in the same clothes, too tired or sore to go back out to the car to get his stuff before he'd headed to her bathroom. She might have suspected that he hadn't brought it in with him in the first place because he hadn't planned on sticking around, except no way would he have taken Sammy out in that weather with such a high fever.

No way would she have let him.

Sammy sat at the table drawing, paper and crayons scattered in front of him. He, too, looked a little better than he had a few hours ago, more alert and happy. Jody wished she could say the latest dose of Tylenol had finally turned the tides, but it was still too early to tell. Dean circled the table and stood behind him, serendipitously confirming what Jody already knew with a playful ruffle of Sammy's floppy hair: his fever wasn't dropping.

Not significantly. Not enough that they could let go the collective breaths they were holding and count themselves out of the woods.

Sammy looked up at Dean and smiled, his dimples poking two deep holes in his flushed face. As far as he was concerned, his world was set. Dean was back. Nothing bad could possibly happen now. Dean returned his smile, betraying none of the doubts, fears, or uncertainties he had to be feeling, and ruffled his hair again.

"So, where's this incredible hot cocoa I keep hearing about?" Dean asked. That was for Sammy's benefit only. The look he gave Jody as he continued around the table and approached the counter told a different story: the least of which being that there had better be something a little more potent in that steaming mug than just marshmallows.

Jody discretely held up a nip of whiskey. "One or two?"

"I had fwee in mine!" Sammy exclaimed. "An' dey was _huuuge!_ "

"Yeah? Think I should go with three, too?" Dean replied. He made a face at Jody, pointing to the nip in her hand, then holding up two fingers in front of his chest where Sammy couldn't possibly see. She rolled her eyes at him but dumped about two shots worth into his mug and topped it off with the Sammy-recommended three marshmallows.

She slid the mug across the countertop. "You're looking a little less like a wilting rose," she commented, up-ending the remaining contents of the nip into her own mug. Something told her she was going to need a little Irish courage to get through the next 24 hours. "I trust the shower helped?"

"You have no idea," he answered, clinking the bottom edge of his mug against hers. He took a small sip. "Wow, kinda reminds me of Sam's eggnog."

If there was a joke in there, it was a private one. He set his mug down on the counter and looked back at Sammy drawing away, seemingly oblivious to their conversation.

"Just getting back here…" He cleared his throat self-consciously. "Seeing that he's okay…sort of…" He shook his head and rolled his shoulder, brushing off the sentimental crack in his armor. "Anyway, uh… I wasn't up there trying to empty your hot water tank. I was talking to Dr. Michales."

"The ME? Already?"

He shrugged, unapologetic and maybe a tad defensive. "So, I called her. Sue me."

Jody raised her hands in surrender.

He sighed. "Sorry, just… I was hoping she had some news, ya know? Something that might…"

 _Something that might help Sam._ Jody nodded in understanding. She'd felt a tiny flare of hope the minute he'd said he'd spoken to the ME, and the disappointment she could feel coming off of him was like a punch to the gut.

"What _did_ she say?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Nuthin' that helps us."

She'd figured that just by looking at him. "Tell me anyway."

He gave her a wry grin. "I know what you're doing."

It was her turn to shrug unapologetically. "Good. Saves me the trouble of calling this Dr. Michales back and asking her myself."

He leaned over so he could put his elbows on the countertop, cupping his hands around the mug as though they were cold. "She was able to confirm the identities of the two kids," he said, staring down at the floating marshmallows melting into a creamy cloud. "They're the last two missing men. And she also confirmed what we knew from the other four kids: no drugs, no foreign substances, no injuries of any kind to account for them being unconscious. EEGs show brain activity, which…was something she couldn't check before." Guilt twisted his features, but he shook that off. Bitter frustration took its place.

"So, not vegetative?"

"She doesn't think so. It's not her specialty, and it's not like she can consult with a neurologist on this, you know? Their fevers are still crazy high, though, between 103 and 104. They should be seizing all over the place but they're not. Respiratory is slow, but steady. Blood ox is normal, so…"

"It sounds like whatever your perp did to them, he needed them to stay relatively healthy while he was doing it."

"So it seems."

"And you have no way to find out what he did or if there's a way to simply reverse it?"

His head shot up, his expression suddenly angry. She had to lock her knees to keep from taking a step back. She hadn't meant to imply anything by the question. She opened her mouth to intercept whatever he was about to unleash on her, but he beat her to it.

"The sonuvabitch never gave us a chance. Believe me, I'd have gotten it outta him. But then those two kids would'a been dead." He pushed himself away from the counter, giving Sammy a quick glance to make sure he wasn't listening to them. Seeing Sammy fully engrossed with his coloring, he pulled Jody further into the kitchen. "When I got back to Nebraska after dropping Sammy off here, I went back to that house bent on tearin' that place apart, but the altar was gone. I knew I should have smashed that damn thing before we bolted, but…I just… I couldn't be sure…"

"You got Sammy out of danger," Jody told him, grasping his arm and shaking it for emphasis. "That is first priority, always. You get the civilians out of harm's way."

"Yeah, well, it ain't like Sam's a civilian, but…" He pulled his arm free, then hissed.

Jody grabbed him again, careful not to jostle him; but dammit, this time he was going to give her a straight answer. "No more bullshit. How bad are you hurt?"

He sighed. "It's just bruising, I swear. Michales tossed me a coupla' ice packs then told me to suck it up and get my ass back to Sammy before she died of _shmoop_ , whatever the hell _that_ is."

Jody could make a guess, but she didn't think Dean was in the mood for such levity. Instead, she picked up the thread of their conversation. There was no telling how long Sammy was going to sit there idly coloring and ignoring them. If they were going to discuss this, they needed to do it now.

"Look, _Sam_ may not be a civilian," she said, "but _Sammy_ is, and he's just a child, to boot. You did the right thing getting him out of there."

Dean didn't look convinced, but he didn't argue. Knowing what she did about them, she had a feeling that he wasn't feeling guilty about putting his brother ahead of the case. He was feeling guilty for _not_ feeling guilty about it.

She pulled open the small cupboard near the fridge and took out a bottle of ibuprofen. "Trust me." She placed the bottle in front of him with maybe a bit more force than was really necessary.

"Thanks." He popped off the lid, dumped out three pills into his palm. Jody refrained from commenting, just returned the bottle to the cupboard as he tossed them back and chased them with a mouthful of spiked cocoa. "It's done, anyway. Not much I can do to change it. Maybe, if I'd been able to find his grimoire…" He rolled his eyes. "'Course, Sam's a hellava lot better at deciphering those things than I am, so…"

"So, what are our options?"

Dean turned his back on her and ran both hands through his hair then locked his fingers at the base of his neck. If the pose pulled or strained his injuries, he made no sound and Jody couldn't see his face to tell. His frustration was palpable. "We stopped him before he could finish his ritual, or whatever, on his last two vics, but he'd already started it. He'd already linked himself to them and opened the channel, assuming we're right and that's what that sigil is for. With him gone, it's _possible_ that they'll be able to take back whatever he'd taken from them through that open channel."

"But what about what turned them into children in the first place?" Jody asked, looking over at Sammy. He was intent on his drawing, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth and his feet swinging beneath his chair.

"I don't know." It had to be so hard for him to admit that. He dropped his hand to his side with a sigh and looked at her over his shoulder. "If it was tied to something in the house where Sam got turned, an object or something painted on the floor, I couldn't find it. He could have moved it when he scrubbed the place, but it could've just as easily burned out of existence once he was done with it.

"I think he had all the victims he needed, or dared take at that time. Once he was done with those last two, he was gonna move on. Just find some place to lie low for a while, reestablish himself where he could blend into the scenery until it was time to start harvesting again.

"I mean, he had already cleared out of his house. Maybe, we'd spooked him and that's why he moved, or maybe that's where he'd been takin' all the others. I don't know. All we found in that room with him was those two kids, a single black candle, and an athame with a black, bone handle. No altar. No books. Not even a soup pot boiling on a hibachi. If he had a grimoire, he'd hidden it already."

"You mean it could still be out there somewhere?"

Dean's smile was grim. "Comforting thought, huh?"

No, it wasn't. Neither was the thought that their options seemed so limited. "So, where does that leave us?"

He balled his hand into a fist, and for a second she thought he was going to punch the wall or the countertop, _anything_ to vent his frustration. Thankfully, he drew his hand down his face, instead, that familiar gesture of helpless. "I don't know," he answered. "We wait and see if it wears off now that the caster is dead."

And hope that Sammy didn't get worse in the meantime.

It didn't bear saying, though it was gouging furrows in Jody's gut. In Dean's, too, she had no doubt. She wanted to ask him how long he thought that might take, but she refrained. He'd already said there were just too many unknowns. Any answer he gave her would have been a guess at best. She knew them both well enough to know how poorly that sat with them, not having the answers they needed to solve the problem, especially when the fate of the other hung in the balance.

She gave him a resigned nod instead. There wasn't much they could do to fix Sammy's problem at the moment, but at least she could help with Dean's. "Okay, then," she said in her take-charge voice. "You've had your shower and you've got your drink. Food is next. Grab the plates, Winchester. This ain't no restaurant."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"Dody?"

"Hey, sweetie. You okay?"

Sammy had fallen asleep halfway through dinner. He'd eaten a few bites of his baked macaroni and cheese—balking at the color of the cheese and the shape of the noodles, just as Dean had predicted, until Jody had suggested he _try it_ before deciding he didn't like it—and taken a few sips of his apple juice, before pushing it away with a heavy sigh. As soon as he'd started grinding at his eyes with his fists, Dean had scooped him up off his chair and had settled him in lap. He was sleeping within minutes.

Dean had finished his meal as though unobstructed by the little body wedged between his chest and the table, polishing off two heaping plates. The way he had bolted his food, as though he'd subsisted on nothing but coffee and adrenaline for days, Jody suspected he'd have found a way to eat had Sammy been a squirming bundle of energy, flailing arms and all.

He hadn't been, of course. He hadn't moved at all, even when Dean had pushed himself to his feet, carried him to the living room, and laid him down on the couch, tucking the army blanket around his small body. That had been over thirty minutes ago.

Sammy blinked up at her, his eyes welling with tears and his lower lip jutting out and trembling. "Did…did Dee weave?"

"Oh, no, honey," Jody hastened to assure him. She sat down beside him, squeezing herself between the top of his head and the arm of the couch. "He just went out to the car to get his stuff. He'll be right back, okay?"

He nodded. "'Kay." He clutched the army blanket a little tighter to his chest and squirmed until he could lay his head on her thigh. "We gonna stay here?"

Was that a note of hopefulness Jody heard in his voice? Or, was it just wishful thinking on her part that he'd want to stay there? He'd told her that he liked it there. She'd assumed he'd meant he liked staying with her in her house. If she was terribly honest with herself, she liked having him there, too.

But was that what she really wanted?

The front door opened bringing with it a gust of cold wind and a flurry of in-drawn snow. Dean stomped his feet off on the mat, pushing the door closed behind him, and toed off his boots to dry by the baseboards. He dropped the one duffle bag he carried to the floor so he could remove his coat and hang it on the rack.

At seeing Sammy awake and watching him, he smiled. "Hey, buddy," he said brightly. "Miss me?"

To Jody's surprise, Sammy shook his head.

Dean narrowed his eyes and regarded his little brother, his skepticism way over-played. "Naw, I think you did," he declared, padding across the floor in his socks.

"Nu-huh," Sammy replied, showing a little more animation than he'd shown just minutes before.

"Uh-huh." Dean squatted down in front of the couch, resting his elbows on his thighs. "You did. You missed me." He feint-poked Sammy in the tummy, eliciting a little sound that was part whimper, part giggle. "C'mon, admit it."

Another shake of the head.

Another teasing jab toward the tummy that didn't _quite_ connect.

The sound was definitely more giggle than whimper.

"Just a little?" Dean coaxed.

Sammy huffed, his little shoulders rising and falling dramatically. What she could see from his profile had Jody bracing for a more vehement denial—and maybe readying to issue a stern _stop teasing your brother_ in her best _Mom_ voice—but it faded as quickly as it flared. He sighed. "Maybe, just a wittwe," he admitted so softly she could barely hear him.

The whole exchange was clearly a game and once again she marveled at how at easily Dean seemed to assess Sammy's distress and redirect it before it escalated to something more.

"I knew it," Dean commented with a self-satisfied smirk. He blew on his nails then buffed them on his shirt and Sammy laughed.

"You siwwy."

"You're sillier," Dean returned.

"You _more_ siwwier."

"Yeah, well, you're the _most_ silliest, in the history of _ever_!"

Jody rolled her eyes. "Okay, you two; knock it off."

"Dat's her Mom voice," Sammy whispered conspiratorially.

"Then, we better listen to her, huh?" Dean whispered back, giving Jody a wink.

"Uh-huh," Sammy answered, sounding very sleepy. His eyes drifted closed, but he opened them again, fighting sleep as only a three-year-old could. "I fought you weft," he said softly and Dean's smile faded from his eyes.

"Naw," Dean said, cupping the side of Sammy's flush face. "We're gonna hang around for a little while."

"'Til I's bigger?"

Jody felt her stomach dip. Alarm flashed across Dean's face, subtle and quickly buried behind a forced smile. "What?"

"'Til I's better," Sammy answered.

Dean looked at Jody, the question clearly all over his face. _You heard him say_ bigger _, right?_ Jody thought she had, but now she was questioning it as much as Dean was. The whole time he'd been with her Sammy had seemed oblivious to what had happened to him. Sure, he'd said things that had made Jody wonder what he remembered of his adult self, but he'd never implied that he was aware he wasn't as he should be.

"Dee?"

Dean tore his gaze away from Jody's, and gave Sammy a reassuring smile that was rather convincing all things considered. "Yeah, 'til you're feelin' better. You don't mind that, right?"

Sammy shook his head. "I wikes it here." His eyes drifted closed and once again, he forced them open, blinking tiredly at his brother. "Guess what we did."

"What?"

A little crater appeared in Sammy's cheek. "We make cookies, an'…an' I got t' hewp."

"Yeah?" A strange smile spread across Dean's face, one Jody didn't quite know how to identify. It seemed a little sad; nostalgic, maybe, but not quite. "That's awesome, Sammy."

"An' I save you some."

"You did? Thanks, buddy. "

Sammy nodded, burrowing into his blanket. He stuffed his thumb into his mouth and sighed. It would only be a matter of minutes before he was sleeping again. And really, it was the best thing for him, even if it was unnerving to see him lying so still. Jody knew that Dean feared otherwise, but she wasn't convinced his fever was the product of anything more sinister than just too much stress in too short a time.

She ran her fingers through his hair and he sighed again. "Why don't you take another little nap," she suggested, "while I go make some coffee for Dean to have with his cookies." Before she could finish her sentence, his eyes drifted closed and stayed that way.

She started to slip out from beneath him, but Dean stopped her with a hand on her knee.

"I got it," Dean said, his voice strangely quiet. He pushed himself to his feet, one arm wrapped tightly around his _just-a-bruise_ d ribs. "Like you said, this ain't a restaurant."

She didn't have to be told twice. She hadn't wanted to move from her spot anyway. Still, she watched him as he left the room, recognizing the sudden need to regroup without an audience. It wasn't that she wasn't wired much the same way. No, not at all.

She could hear him in the kitchen opening and closing cupboards and drawers. He wasn't shy about searching for whatever he needed and there was nothing in her kitchen she wouldn't have wanted him to find accidentally, so she left him to it. The sounds were normal, for all that they were no longer commonplace in her house. If he was angry or frustrated or… hurt—which, she realized might have been what she'd seen woven into that melancholic smile he'd given his brother—he wasn't taking it out on her woodwork.

She leaned back into the couch cushion and looked down at the child pillowed on her thigh. He was sleeping soundly, his soft inhales and exhales punctuated only by the gentle smacks and pops as he worked his thumb in his mouth. Absently, she twirled a lock of his hair between her fingers. Was it foolish to think she could somehow commit the feel of those silky strands to memory? Did she really remember the way Owen's hair had felt when he was three, or was that just a sentimental notion all mother's had that they never forgot the smell of their children's skin or the feel of their hair or the sound of their laughter?

Jody wasn't the sentimental type, but she'd argue with the skeptics that she would _never_ forget a single thing about her son. And, yet, she knew how the sharpness of the details had begun to fade. Time had worn down the colors and the sounds and the textures, made them pastel and muted and soft. At times, she feared they would disappear altogether. At times, she wondered: if she'd known, if she'd had more time, could she have _somehow_ written those memories deeper into her skin, burned those images on her retinas, and recorded that music on the drum of her ears?

The best she'd been able to do was tattoo his name over her rib. Over time, it too might fade and change colors, but it would never disappear. It would always be there.

She let herself notice the feel of Sammy's hair, the way it glided through her fingers and coiled around her knuckle. Owen's hair had been straight, the color a little lighter and the texture a little coarser. Were she to lift Sammy onto her shoulder and breathe in the scent of him, she'd know he smelled different from how Owen had smelled: nothing she could quantify in actual words, but the way _Johnson's Baby Wash_ smelled different from _Mr. Bubble._

Owen's voice had been a little higher than Sammy's was, his _L_ s and _R_ s no less pronounced, but his _S_ s more prone to a slight lisp. Sammy tended to chatter quietly when he played where Owen had filled the house with onomatopoeia: explosions and _Bang!_ and _Boom!_ and _Splat!_ Only their laughter seemed similar, bubbling up out of their little bodies, unfettered and weightless. Owen had laughed more often, and at the silliest of things. Sammy seemed to reserve those deep, effervescent belly laughs only for Dean.

Strange how so many of those things seemed closer to the surface suddenly, and not in the way that damned sippy cup had gone off like an emotional landmine under her feet, knocking down so many of her carefully constructed walls and leaving her raw and exposed. Perhaps, it was the crumbling down of those walls that made it easier for her to remember those things now without the sucker punch to the gut.

Sammy sighed softly, but didn't wake. Jody kept up the gentle motion through his hair, loath to lose that tactile pleasure just yet. Who knew how much longer she'd have to enjoy it? Who knew…

She pushed that thought aside. She didn't want to think about how, by this time tomorrow, Sammy could very well be gone forever.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~  
_


	8. Chapter 8

**AN:** I'm just so blown away by the responses for this story. I can't thank you all enough.

 **~~~~~Chapter 8~~~~~**

( _Monday 6:30PM_ )

The snow had started an hour ago, a few airy flakes quickly turning to near whiteout conditions. If Dean had been inclined to take off, he wouldn't have gotten very far in that car. As it was, whatever demon had sent him into the kitchen under the guise of making coffee and hunting down cookies, hadn't followed him back out. He'd reset his game face, whether for Sammy's benefit or hers—or maybe his own—and had acted like it had never been out of whack at all; two mugs of coffee clutched in one hand, a plate of cookies in the other, and a boyish grin pulling the corner of his mouth.

He'd wisely said nothing about whatever expression Jody hadn't been able to wipe off her own face in time. There had been a distinctly watery wash over her vision seconds before he'd appeared. Perhaps, he hadn't really noticed. His gaze had gone straight to Sammy sleeping soundly beside her, sucking away on his thumb as if he thought it might disappear on him as he slept.

"Amazing his teeth aren't as bucked out as a beaver's," was all he'd said in a soft whisper so as not to wake him. The way Sammy seemed to know instinctively whenever Dean was near, it was surprising it hadn't.

They'd shared their dessert in silence. Dean made a damned good— _strong_ —cup of coffee, which he drank black. She'd shared more than a few cups of coffee with Sam over the years. He, too, liked his coffee espresso- strong—though, she suspected it was more for the caffeine-effect than for the actual taste. He'd confessed to her the first morning they'd spent pouring over Bobby's boxes of books looking for a way to find Dean during the Chronos incident, that he'd acquired a taste for "what Dean calls girlie, frou frou coffee" while at Stanford. At the time, she didn't know what had surprised her more, the fact that he'd gone to _Stanford_ , or the fact that he'd seemed mildly embarrassed—ashamed, even—by the fact.

Of course, he hadn't elaborated, had not-so-neatly changed the subject in a blatant _I-don't-want-to/can't-talk-about-it_ fashion that she hadn't felt quite comfortable enough with him yet, to disregard. She'd since realized that there were _a lot_ of subjects that boy—apparently, _both_ boys—didn't want to/couldn't talk about. She supposed she couldn't fault them for it. She didn't like people picking at her emotional scabs and scar tissue either. She had a feeling they had a lot more of it than she did.

"Okay, out with it," Dean said suddenly. "You have that look on your face, like you're just dying to ask or say something and it's starting to make my teeth ache."

"Is that an invitation to talk?" she quipped.

"Talk?" He snorted. "Never said that."

"Oh. So, I can ask, but that doesn't mean you'll answer."

"Always knew you were a smart lady."

She just shook her head. She regarded him for a moment, weighing her options. She certainly had enough questions rattling around in her head. Did she start with something easy and innocuous, or did she go for broke?

"Yes," he said, before she even opened her mouth. She blinked in surprise and he chuckled. "Yes, Sam was like this when he was little."

Okay, so maybe it wasn't the question she was going to ask, but it was certainly one of the many she had.

"He was a whiney pain in the ass, don't get me wrong; but… he was really sweet, too. And trusting. God, he used t'scare my dad and me somethin' awful. He'd just walk up to total strangers and start talking to them. And if someone was nice to him first…" He shook his head. "Man. If there was ever a kid who'd 've fallen for that _I've gotta a trunkful of puppies_ line, it was Sammy."

There was such fondness in his expression as his gaze fell on Sammy's sleeping form, but there was something else there, too; something Jody couldn't quite identify. It was dark and pain-filled, the memory of a close call perhaps.

"It was just the three of you, huh?"

Dean's gaze shot up to meet hers and for a second, she wondered if that was one of those _can't-talk-about-it_ questions. "Uh… Yeah. Just our dad, Sammy, and me. Our mom…she, uh…she died when I was four."

"I'm sorry."

He gave a small nod of acknowledgement, clearly embarrassed by the sympathy. "Hey, we all got into Hunting somehow."

She hadn't expected him to reveal that much. Maybe, he hadn't either. He quickly shook his head, stopping her cold before she could ask him what had happened.

"You moved around a lot, huh?" she asked instead.

"Maybe," he answered, a little too quickly and a _lot_ too defensively.

She put up her hand in surrender. "Hey, I'm not judging."

"Yeah, you are," he said, but there was no heat in it.

"Okay, maybe I am, just a little. It's just, Sammy said some things…"

"Just _some_ things _?_ "

"Okay, he said _a lot_ of things," she conceded with a fond smile of her own. "It's just that _some_ of the things he said… well, in my line of work, you're trained to notice certain things when you see 'em, and when you hear 'em."

"Sammy always did have an overactive imagination," Dean remarked casually.

A little _too_ casually.

"I can certainly believe that." She took a sip of her coffee, stalling a bit as she watched Dean closely over the rim of her mug. She had a feeling he knew exactly what she was trying to ask him. There was a subtle shift in his posture and a wary tightening around his eyes. He was raising his defenses, preparing to evade or avoid or deflect any unwanted interest.

She'd seen Sam do the same thing, though he wasn't nearly as smooth about it as Dean was, apparently. His face was simply too open, too expressive. It didn't mean he didn't keep his secrets; it was just more obvious that he was doing it.

"Look, I know what it looks like when a kid is living under the radar and between the cracks."

"And?" he asked, which was pretty much a confirmation right there. "So? You _do_ know it's kinda a moot point now. Over. Done. Water under the bridge."

She nodded. "For you and Sam, yeah. I suppose. Not so much for Sammy, at the moment. He was really worried about staying here another night, and I realized that, technically, _I_ was one of the authorities he was afraid would come and take him away. And I'd have done it, too. I _have_ done it, taken kids away from their parents, some of them good people who just couldn't do right by their kids no matter how much they loved them."

Dean cringed. "Yeah, well. No offense, but I'm glad we didn't know you back then." There was surprisingly little bite to his words, as though he really was glad, and not just because of what it might have meant for his family had they crossed paths when they were children. "Look, our Dad wouldn't have won any awards. Hell, Bobby once threatened to shoot him if he ever saw him again, and it was probably on account of them disagreeing on something to do with Sam and me. But he did right by us, as best he could. It ain't like he really had much of a choice, considering what's really out there. "

"I guess when you put it that way," Jody said reluctantly, "I'm glad I didn't know you back then, either."

He raised his coffee mug to her and she followed suit. As he'd said, it was water under the bridge. Whatever hardships they'd faced as kids, they certainly hadn't let it stop them from growing into two damned amazing young men. That might not have been the case if some well-intentioned civil servant or social worker had interceded on their behalf, yanking them away from their father, or more importantly, from each other.

It didn't make it any easier to accept. It didn't help ease the knot of regret in her gut that tasted too much like pity even on her tongue. No way would he have swallowed that and not spit it right back in her face, though, and rightly so. They didn't deserve anyone's pity. What they did deserve was whatever help she could give them, even if she did feel the need to shove it down their throats to get them to take it.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

She knew Dean stood in the doorway. He'd been standing there for quite some time, leaning against the jamb with his arms crossed in front of his chest, one foot crossed in front of the other, and an amused smirk pulling one corner of his mouth. Sammy sat beside her on the bed, his stuffed tiger clutched tightly in his arms. His gaze fixed intently on the book in her hands, his eyes following the path of her finger as it traced beneath each word she read. Every once and a while, he'd say the words with her. It was unlikely he could actually read them, despite how smart he was. Jody suspected he'd memorized some of the pages, and not just after having listened to _her_ read it to him twice, already.

"Dat wittwe puppy's vewy smart," Sammy said, rubbing at his eyes sleepily. "Him figger out how t'get outta dat cage aww by hisself. I's stuck in a cage one time and I couldn't get out."

Behind her, Dean sucked in a harsh breath. Jody looked up at the sound, and she caught a glimpse of the stricken expression on his face before he pushed himself away from the jamb and turned away.

"But Dee finded me," Sammy continued. Dean stopped, his back to the room and ramrod straight. There'd been a note of such nonchalance in Sammy's voice, as though it was the most obvious thing in his entire three-year-old world: the notion that Dean would find him.

"Of course, he did," Jody said, her gaze still on Dean's rigid back. He hadn't walked away, but he was still thinking about it. It wasn't clear if he was trying to talk himself into it or out of it, to make himself stay when what he really needed to do was leave, or to make himself leave when what he really wanted to do was stay.

"Is Dee gonna sweep in here, wiff me?" Sammy asked suddenly.

The randomness of the question caught her off guard and she floundered after an answer. Dean spun back around, that forced smile pushing back the edges of whatever battle he'd been waging just seconds before. "You better believe it, Tiger."

There was determination and deliberation in every line of his body when he strode up to the side of Sammy's bed, and when Sammy launched himself at Dean with excitement, he plucked that eager little body right out of the air, his injuries be damned! For one fleeting second, as he hugged his little brother close, the mask slipped. Whatever memory Sammy had inadvertently triggered, it wasn't letting go. Any protest Jody might have made about Dean sleeping on the floor—or squeezing into the same twin bed with his brother—flew out the window. The benefit of having his brother close far outweighed any detriment to his injuries.

Dean had let her get Sammy ready for bed, but it was clear that there had been a changing of the guard, whether she'd been ready to give up her post just yet, or not. She set the book on the end of the bed and quietly rose to her feet. Dean had his and Sammy's foreheads together, the two of them engaged in a discussion that excluded all else, and for all that it hurt like hell to be on the outside looking in, she recognized it for the rare honor it was that he was letting her see as much of it as he was.

She indulged herself a moment longer, blatantly and unapologetically. She'd earned it, after all. But she was no masochist, and it didn't take long before she realized that she was now the one who needed to just rip that Band-Aid off and be done with it. It wasn't as if she could say good-bye to Sammy. He'd hugged her as she'd carried him to his bath and after she'd helped him into his pajamas and again when she'd agreed to read him a story. That was going to have to suffice.

She drank in their closeness a moment more, hoping to commit to memory the way the fond, easy smile Dean gave his brother creased the corners of his eyes and lips. There was no denying that he was an attractive young man—and Jody knew, he knew it, too—but in that moment, he was stunning.

And he probably didn't even have a clue.

The thought made her smile, which made it a little easier for her to turn away, finally, and leave the room. She lingered in the hallway for a minute, listening to the sweet sound of Sammy gigging at something Dean, no doubt, had just said or done. Her smile grew even as her eyes began to sting. Hastily, she swiped at them with the back of her finger, then made a bee-line for her kitchen.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"You okay?"

It was on the tip of her tongue to counter and deflect by volleying the same question right back at him. Then again, he wasn't the one standing in the kitchen contemplating the pros and cons of cracking open a second nip of whiskey—without the hot cocoa this time. She fingered the cap of the little bottle, but then she returned it to the cupboard unopened and closed the door.

"Peachy," she remarked, turning her back on the cabinet to lean against the counter. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. "You?"

Dean snorted. "Ditto." He dropped his elbows onto the counter, his gaze lingering on his fingers. He looked so exhausted, she almost pulled the nip back out and offered it to him.

"I'm surprised Sammy let you out of his sight," she said instead.

He chuckled. "Yeah, well, uhm… he was a little upset that you didn't say good night before you left the room." She could only nod at that. If she'd opened her mouth and tried to speak, she wasn't sure that tight ball of emotion at the base of her throat wouldn't have choked her.

Or worse, broken loose.

"You're really great with him," Dean said, his gaze still fixed on his hands. That wasn't an easy thing for him to say, if she was reading the strained quality of his voice correctly.

"Yeah, well, this ain't exactly _my_ first rodeo, either." As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. She hadn't meant to sound so bitter.

Dean winced. "I know." She opened her mouth to apologize, but he shook his head. "Y' know, this is gonna sound terrible…" He shook his head again. "It's just… The first time through he got dealt a real crap hand, you know? And watchin' you with him, just now, and hearing about you two baking cookies and playing games, it kinda brings home everything he missed out on growin' up."

"Sounds like you both missed out on a lot of things."

Dean made a face, though what exactly he was dismissing, she wasn't sure. "He once told me that he didn't get the crusts cut off his PB&J. At the time, it just pissed me off, like something as stupid as that justified why he didn't look at _family_ the same way I did. Now…"

He fell silent; his brow dipped so low, there was a crease carved into his forehead. It was giving Jody a headache just looking at it. Or, maybe it was the whole situation itself that was making her head pulse behind her eyes. It had been one hell of a long and stressful day, and there was no indication that the night was going to be any easier. Sammy's fever still hovered at that same mark, the Tylenol keeping it low enough to justify the lack of professional medical intervention—not that there would be much a pediatrician could do about what could still very well be a _supernatural_ ailment—but not getting rid of it completely.

There was a revelation there in Dean's words, and it put context and meaning to some of the painfully nostalgic expressions Jody had seen flash across his face. It wasn't every day Fate gave you a glimpse of _what might have been, if only._ As much as she wanted to delve more deeply into it, however, it was clear that Dean did not.

"Still nothing helpful from the ME?" Jody asked, gently changing the subject. The look of gratitude on Dean's face told her she'd read him correctly.

He shook his head, pushing himself away from the countertop. "Not really." He'd called the ME for an update as Jody was getting Sammy ready for bed. She'd hoped he'd been gone as long as he had because there had been developments. Apparently, not. "There's been no change in their conditions. Mason, he was victim number five. Michales seems to think he's a little worse off than Danielson, but she didn't really get into specifics. She's gonna keep monitoring them over night and call me in the morning if there's any change."

He yawned suddenly, and he covered his face in both hands as though he thought he could wipe away his obvious fatigue, or hide it from her. She shook her head in fond exasperation. "Well, it sounds like there's nothing else we can do, tonight," she said. "You sure you don't want to take the couch? It's pretty comfortable for a pull-out."

"No. I don't wanna be too far away from him."

 _In case, something happens._

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

She dug out extra blankets and pillows from a cedar chest at the end of her bed and handed the pile to Dean. She hated the idea of him sleeping on the floor, but she understood his need to be near his brother. He followed her back to Sammy's room, but stopped outside the door.

"Say good night to him?" he asked, shifting the pile of bedding in his arms.

What he was really saying was, _I'll give you some privacy,_ though if it was to say _good night_ or _good bye_ , she didn't want to know.

Sammy lay on his side, the blanket pulled up tight under his chin so only the ears of his stuffed tiger were visible. His eyes were closed, and for a second Jody just stood there beside the bed and watched him breathe. His hair twisted around his ear and fanned out around him, the soft, russet strands like calligraphy against the white canvas of his pillow. His lashes were a dark, feathery smudge across his fever-flushed cheeks.

He was smiling in his sleep, she realized. He'd told her more than once that he liked it there. She wondered if he now thought of that bed as _his_ bed and that room as _his_ room. She had a feeling it was going to be a long time before she didn't think of those things in those terms.

She felt that familiar burn start up in her eyes and that tight ball of pressure in her throat. She pressed her fingers to her lips then touched them to Sammy's hair. "Good—"

Sammy's eyes popped open and he smiled up at her. "I fought you forgot to say good night," he whispered.

She forced her tears away and sat down on the edge of his bed. He immediately sat up and threw his arms out wide, somehow ending up in her lap before she quite realized he'd moved. She gathered him close and rested her cheek on his crown, and she felt his little arms wrap around her sides. "And miss out on one of your hugs?" she answered back. "Never."

His little hands fisted in the material of her shirt, and he made one of those happy little humming sounds. How easy it was to make him happy. How utterly uncomplicated and pure were his needs. No wonder Dean seemed to be struggling with this, everything about his body language earlier projecting doubt and guilt at war with a secret wish that Sammy could have, for a little while longer, the childhood he'd been denied the first time.

"Dody?" Sammy whispered, a timid note creeping into his voice.

"What, sweetie."

"Is—s'okay if… if I teww you, I—I wuv you?"

A sob threatened, and she had to swallow it down through that golf-ball of grief in her throat before she could speak. She squeezed him tighter. "Always," she uttered. She pressed a kiss to the top of his head and tasted the salt of her tears in the strands. "I love you, too."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

She found herself wrapped up in Dean's arms as soon as she stepped out of the room.

"I'm so sorry, Jody," was all he said, and the sob she'd held back in front of Sammy tore loose.

"Damn you, Winchester." She didn't mean it, and yet she did. But not really. She wasn't mad at him for doing this to her, for giving her back the taste for something she'd worked so _fucking_ hard to stop craving. She wasn't. It wasn't his fault. It had been unavoidable. The only way he could have spared her this pain would have been if he'd chosen _not_ to come to her for help in the first place.

And, so help her _God!_ If she had found out he'd done that… Well, then she _really_ would have been mad at him. _Police Brutality_ pissed.

No, she wasn't mad at him for tearing open her barely-mended heart. But, _dammit!_ Now, she was crying on his shoulder, and it was simply because he'd seen she was hurting and he'd _hugged_ her, and if he even _thought_ about razzing her about snot-bubble epaulets, she was going to cuff him to the support pole in her garage.

He wisely said nothing else. He just tightened his arms around her, which was wonderful and awful at the same time. How the hell was she supposed to compose herself now? Unbidden, came the thought: why did she think she needed to?

The simple answer was, because she did. As illogical or irrational an answer as that was, she just couldn't let herself fall apart.

But his arms were strong, and what he was offering her in that moment was as honest and uncomplicated as it came. And maybe, she told herself, he needed a little comforting, too. He was a proud, young man; but these last few days had sent him through the ringer as much, if not more, than they had, her. There was no doubt in her mind that he was hurting, too. She'd seen it in his face all evening. She'd heard it in his voice during every phone call they'd shared.

The simple truth was, it was so much easier for her to take what he was offering, a strong shoulder to lean on, if she thought he was getting one back from her in return. They were _her boys_ now, and she needed to be the strong, reliable support figure they needed her to be.

She indulged herself in that embrace a moment longer, then pulled back. His eyes were none too dry, she noticed, his lashes darkened and clumped in places around his bright, green eyes. He looked like he wanted to ask her if she was okay. She almost asked him that herself. They both seemed to reach the decision not to ruin the moment with such a stupid and unnecessary question at the same time. He gave her a small, lopsided smile, instead, and looked away.

She cupped one hand to the side of his face, drew him closer, and kissed his forehead. "Good night," she said. He looked up again, a slight flush of embarrassment tinging his cheeks. Jody felt her footing solidify beneath her at the sight. She patted his cheek and gave him a smile. She could only hope it was a reassuring one. "Holler if you need anything." _Thank you._

He nodded. "We're good." _You, too._

She turned her back on him and walked to her room, closing the door behind her with a soft _snick._ Once there, she leaned back against the door, her hands clutching the doorknob at the base of her back. Though the tears had stopped, they still threatened, lurking in wait behind her eyes. She took a deep breath, hoping to ease the tight band of sorrow around her throat. Physically, it would probably feel better if she just cried some more, just bawled and railed and wrung herself completely dry and empty.

That just wasn't her way. It took a conscience effort to let go of the doorknob and walk away from the door. She didn't want to analyze why that should be—or maybe, she didn't want to admit how obvious the reason was. Sammy had Dean to look after him, and if there was any change in his condition—good or bad—Dean would be on it. For now, he was as safe as he could possibly be.

She'd officially been relieved of duty.

She quickly went through her nighttime routine, feeling very detached from the whole process of teeth-brushing and face-washing. She crawled into bed and stared up at the ceiling, knowing that she'd sleep whether she wanted to or not, despite her worry, despite her knowledge that, if all went well, when she woke in the morning, the little boy who now had her heart would be gone.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

Jody woke with a start and quickly grabbed the small clock on her nightstand. 6:45 blinked back at her mockingly, the absence of a tiny red light in the corner of the display reminding her that she hadn't set the alarm the night before. She set the clock back on the table and lay there with her arm out-flung across the mattress and covered her eyes with her other hand.

So, she'd slept, though she couldn't for the life of her recall the passage of time. Exhaustion could do that to a person. Strange—though, maybe not so much—she didn't feel all that rested. There was a subtle pressure like an invisible thumb digging into the center of her forehead, and her eyes felt like someone had peeled back her eyelids while she'd slept and sprinkled sand across her corneas.

Damn, she hated crying right before bed.

She thought about going back to sleep. It wasn't as if Dean didn't know where to find her. If he needed anything, he wasn't shy about hunting her down and asking or hunting it down and taking. She'd pretty much already told him to make himself at home. As soon as she closed her eyes, though, they popped back open. As unrested as she felt, she realized she was too keyed up to stay in bed.

Truth was, not knowing what she'd find on the other side of the door to her spare bedroom was enough to prod her out from beneath the covers. She strained to listen, but all she heard back was the creaking and popping of the house. If they were awake, they weren't speaking; or if they were, they were doing so very quietly.

Or, they'd snuck out of the house in the middle of the night.

That thought had her throwing a bathrobe over her pajamas, instead of getting dressed, and hurrying from her room in her bare feet. Her hand was on the doorknob of Sammy's room when she checked herself. She couldn't just go barging in there without knocking. She let go of the knob and raised her knuckle to the door.

It suddenly flew open.

She jumped back, startled. Dean drew back, equally as surprised.

"Dean—" she started, but then she noticed the look of devastation and fury on his face. He didn't say anything, just pushed past her as if the devil himself was hot on his heels. "What—?"

She started to go after him, but stopped. He'd left the door wide open in his haste to leave the room, and her heart slammed up into her throat. _Oh, God. No!_ She stumbled into the room, terrified of what she'd find when she got there, but unable not to look, and skidded to a halt at the foot of the bed.

Sammy looked up at her from the center of the bed, very much still alive, but very much still a three-year-old.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	9. Chapter 9

**AN:** Let's try this post again. I'm not sure what happened with the formatting, but hopefully it's correct this time.

 _ **~~~~~Chapter 9~~~~~**_

( _Tuesday 6:45AM_ )

"Is Dee gonna be sick?" Sammy asked her.

She stared at him, too shocked stupid to comprehend the question. She'd been so certain… Hadn't she? When she'd gone to bed the night before, she'd told herself he'd be gone by morning. She'd told herself that because she'd needed to prepare herself. But had she really believed that? Clearly, Dean had.

She didn't have a lot of time to react, though it seemed like time had frozen around her as she'd stood there gaping like a rookie at her first crime scene. Sammy's eyes filled with tears, and he curled in on himself until all she could see of him above the blanket was the top of his mop-head.

"He wook wike he gonna be sick," he said into the blanket, his distress building.

It snapped Jody out of her daze. "No, sweetie," she said, dropping down onto the edge of the bed beside his legs. "I'm sure he's fine." She was sure of no such thing. She wasn't even sure if he was just downstairs stealing the nip she'd been toying with the night before, or if he was getting ready to take off back to Nebraska. The latter seemed all too possible. So much so, that she found herself right back on her feet.

"Sammy, I need you to stay right here for a little while."

He raised his head and looked up at her through his bangs. "Do I gotta hide in da cwoset?"

"What? No. No, I just have to talk to Dean for a minute."

His shoulders drooped and his face twisted into a scowl that might have been adorable if she hadn't seen how intimidating its older version could be. "Big people talk?"

"Yes, honey."

"Fine!" he huffed angrily and threw himself onto his side in the bed.

There was nothing she could do to cheer him up, except relent. That wasn't really an option. Neither could she give him a promise that she'd be right back. The look she'd seen on Dean's face when he'd stormed out of the room hadn't been a _be-right-back_ kind of face.

She pulled the bedroom door closed behind her, hoping that Sammy would indeed stay in the room as she'd instructed, and raced after Dean

He was stuffing his feet into his boots when she caught up to him, his coat half on, half off, and threatening to slide off his shoulder and on to the floor.

"It's in the garage," she remarked, folding her arms across her chest. He barely looked at her as he straightened and punched his fist down the other sleeve. He reached for the doorknob. "The shovel," she elaborated. "'Cause, you better be walking out that door to go shovel my walk."

He yanked the door open and grasped the handle of the storm door, but stopped. "I can't just…" He shook his head, the muscle in his jaw clenching. He sounded on the verge of violence.

"Dean—"

He spun on her. "What?" he snapped, and it was there, too, in his face: the threat of violence barely contained. "That sonuvabitch left something behind—"

She stepped right up in his personal space. "So, what? You're just gonna hop in your car and take off back to Nebraska? And after you damn near wore yourself out trying to get back _here_?"

"He's not staying like this, Jody. He's _not!"_

"And what if he is?"

She'd sounded so calm, so reasonable. She wasn't sure how when deep inside, she certainly didn't feel that way. Dean recoiled as if she'd screamed the words at him. He probably wished she had. It was always easier to meet anger with anger. Reason tended to suck the heat right out of a person, unless that person was a colossal jackass. Dean wasn't. He was a good man backed into a corner by a possibility he just wasn't ready to accept.

She couldn't blame him one bit, but that didn't change the facts that were starting to stack up in front of them. The witch was dead. Whatever spell he'd cast to de-age his intended victims hadn't worn off with his death. Sammy and the two victims in Nebraska hadn't reverted to their proper ages. Whatever link his spell might have created between him and the two victims in Nebraska, it hadn't broken with his death. As far as they knew, Mason and Danielson were still unconscious. Maybe the only means to undo what that witch had done had died with him.

"Dean," she said gently.

He turned away from her, but not before she saw the tears form in his eyes. "No," he said. "I can't—"

"We may not have a choice."

"We?" he shot back over his shoulder. He sounded so bitter suddenly. "You volunteering then? 'Cuz, I gotta tell ya, I raised that kid once already, and I did a _fuck's_ -all job of it."

"Not from where I'm standing."

He snorted, his eyes cruel and derisive. That it was all directed at himself made her want to shake the crap out of him. "Yeah, well, try standin' over here. The view ain't all that pretty from this side of the fence, an' if Sam told you different and you believed him, he's a better liar than me."

"For two people with, apparently, _so_ much practice, you _both_ suck at it," she snapped back, exasperated. He made another of those scathing sounds and pushed the storm door open. Her hand shot out and grabbed his sleeve to stop him. "You listen to me, Dean Winchester." She yanked him around to face her. "Whatever the hell _crap_ is going on between you and _Sam_ , it has _nothing_ to do with that little boy upstairs. I just spent the last four days listening to _Dean, this_ and _Dean, that_. You may _think_ that Sam had a crap life because of _you_ , which, I gotta say is the _dumbest_ damned thing I've heard come out of a Winchester's mouth—"

Dean rolled his eyes and tugged to free his arm from her grasp. She didn't let go. " _Sammy_ thinks you hung the fucking moon!" she continued, giving his arm a shake for emphasis. " _Sammy_ thinks you're Batman, for crying out loud. As far as he's concerned, there is _nobody_ in this entire world who does _anything_ better than you do."

He looked down at the floor and his arm went slack in her hold. She thought, maybe, just maybe, she was getting through to him. But then he set his jaw. "He's _three_ , Jody," he said, as though that discredited anything and everything Sammy might believe.

She sighed. "And you were how old the first time 'round?" she asked brutally. "Seven? And how old are you now? Jesus, Dean. Cut yourself some slack, already."

He shook his head. "Yeah, you're right. What am I thinking?"

Damned if she knew, but she knew it wasn't what she wanted him to be thinking.

"I'll just find a daycare to put him in while I go out and hunt down the local skinwalker making puppy chow out of the varsity basketball team. You know, 'cuz that's such a long-term, well-payin', and stable nine t'five job."

"Or, maybe you quit," she suggested.

He looked directly at her, and once again, she was reminded that there was just so much about their life she didn't know. "You think we haven't tried that before?" he asked. "Hell, Sam has walked away so many times, I've lost count. And every damn time, something has yanked him back in. Never mind the grocery list of things that would just love to get their hands on him—and they ain't all monsters, neither. We ain't exactly been makin' friends all this time, you know."

She had no response she could give him for that, no counter that would invalidate or even lessen the strength of that argument. It was a dangerous life, they lead; it was certainly no place for a child. But would they be any safer doing something else? Evil was still out there. Monsters still existed. And, no doubt about it, the Winchesters had made a name for themselves. If that didn't paint a giant bull's eye on their backs, she didn't know what else did.

"I guess, there's no supernatural WitSec," she commented, maybe a little too glib for his mood.

To her surprise, he actually smirked. "There's ways to hide," he said. "Spells and sigils that can conceal…"

He stopped suddenly, a look of realization stealing over his face that chased away a bit of his color.

"What?" she asked.

"How could I be so stupid?" He turned to leave.

Jody yanked him back again. "Dammit, Dean!"

He turned on her, grabbing her arm. "The room was empty," he said, as if that explained anything. She shook her head in incomprehension, and he sighed impatiently. "The room where Sam and I found his altar was empty when I went back. Completely cleaned out. Like nothing had ever been there. Forensics couldn't find a trace of anything, no finger prints, no blood or residue, nothing."

"Fingerprints can be wiped away," she pointed out. "And, if he never killed anyone there, there'd be no blood."

"Right. But something in that room transformed Sam. Maybe, all the victims."

"But you said that could have burned away when he'd reached his body count."

"I know. But there'd still be something there. A subtle scorch mark in the concrete. A discoloration. Something. There was _nothing_ there. What if it was just concealed?"

"You can do that?"

He laughed. It wasn't a very humorous sound. "Sam and I had sigils on our ribs that made us invisible to _angels!_ "

Something told her, that wasn't a metaphor. She shook her head in disbelief. "Maybe you can hide something from your eyes, but science isn't going to be fooled."

"You'd be surprised," he answered cryptically. "And, I don't care how CSI you are, you can't analyze what you don't find, and there are sigils and spells that can make you simply _not look_ for something."

She was still processing that when Dean pulled out of her grasp and bolted out the door. "Dean!"

He was halfway down her walk, blazing a path through the five to six inches of powdery snow with determination. Without slowing, he hollered over his shoulder, "I need something outta the trunk."

She threw her arms up in the air, then clutched her bathrobe tighter around her. "You take off, I'm puttin' out a BOLO on your ass!"

"Put on a pot of coffee, instead!" he yelled back. "We're gonna need it."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

She got dressed quickly, then went to get Sammy, finding him in the exact same position as when she'd left him, lying on his side with his back to the room (to her), staring at the wall. The scowl was gone, replaced with tears and pout and shuddering little sniffles. She wondered if he was just trying to make her feel guilty, laying it on a little heavy in the hopes that she'd apologize or give in. She didn't doubt for a minute that he was capable of such manipulation.

That didn't seem to be the case though.

"You ready to come down for breakfast?" she asked him. When he didn't move from his spot, she sat down on the edge of his bed. One touch to his cheek told her his fever was back up. Where he hadn't had a dose of Tylenol since he'd gone to bed, that wasn't too surprising. "Sammy?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "Is Dee gonna has some, too?"

"Breakfast?" He nodded, and she couldn't help but laugh. "I think that's a safe bet. And, if we don't hurry up, he's probably going to drink all the coffee."

He scrunched up his face. "Dat's yucky."

 _You say that now, kiddo,_ she thought.

He finally uncurled himself from his sulk and let her carry him from the room, his arms wrapped tight around her neck and his head on her shoulder. A quick trip to the bathroom, and when they made it to the dining room, Dean was already at the table, cup of coffee clutched absently in one hand and a pile of books stacked on the chair beside him. One large book was open in front of him and Jody could smell its musty pages from across the room, even over the rich aroma of coffee.

"Told you," she said to Sammy, giving him a little bounce in her arms.

Dean looked up at her approach, his eyes meeting hers briefly before shifting over to his brother. If Sammy noticed, he didn't let on. Apparently, he was saving the guilt trip for Dean. At least, Dean seemed to think he deserved it. He pushed himself to his feet and came around the table to intersect Jody.

It was a smooth hand-off. For all Sammy seemed bent on moping about, he went easily into Dean's arms. "Sorry for boltin' on ya this morning, Sammy," Dean said softly.

Jody didn't linger to hear what Sammy said back, if anything. She continued on to the kitchen, giving them the privacy they needed. "How's pancakes sound?" she asked. The answer didn't matter. _She_ thought pancakes sounded _awesome_ , so _that_ was what she was making whether they wanted them or not. She poured herself a cup of coffee and set to work pulling out skillet and mixing bowl and ingredients.

By the time the pancakes were done, Sammy was sitting on Dean's lap, coloring. His head was resting on his arm, and he seemed to be merely drawing squiggles across the paper. Dean just watched him, his attention miles away, and his coffee cup empty at his elbow.

He came back to himself as soon as she set the plate of pancakes on the table and he gave her a quick smile of thanks, pushing Sammy's drawings aside and situating him in his own chair at Dean's side. Breakfast was quiet and quick. Dean smothered his stack in butter and syrup and lit into it like a man possessed. Sammy ate a few bites, but it was clear to them both that he wasn't very hungry. Luckily, he'd eaten enough that they weren't worried that the dose of Tylenol they gave him was going to make him sick.

When they finished, Dean scooped Sammy up and disappeared into the living room as she cleared the dishes from the table. She swiped the table with a wet cloth to remove any drips of syrup and refilled their mugs, then put on a fresh pot of coffee.

"He okay?" she asked as Dean came back into the room.

"Yeah. He's on the couch with a stack of books, a pad of paper, and his crayons." He shook his head, the corner of his mouth twitching upward in fond exasperation. "He'll be good for a while."

He hoisted the stack of books that had been sitting on the chair beside him and thumped them down on the center of the table. "Do you have any idea what you're looking for?" she asked, eyeing the pile dubiously. Several of them looked like she'd need a tetanus shot after handling them.

"Specifically?" Dean dug his fingers into the base of his neck and sighed. "Not really." He reached for the big book he'd been looking at earlier and spread it open in front of his chair. It looked ancient, and once again, the musty smell of old paper assailed her, along with something cloying that settled unpleasantly into the back of her throat.

She couldn't help but make a face of disgust. "Do I even want to know what those pages are made of?"

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "Probably not."

"Wonderful."

He chuckled. "Here." He pulled out a heavy book from the center of the stack and slid it over to her. "The only skin used in this book is pig."

He was laughing at her, she realized, the little shit. It was kind of nice to see him uncoiling a little, despite the seriousness of the situation. She still gave him a glare as she pulled the book in front of her and flipped over the cover, playing along. The writing was a spidery script in a language that might have been Latin, but could have been Tolkien High Elvish for all she recognized the words. There were symbols beside each block of text, some ornate tangles of harsh and fine pen strokes and others crude and simplistic slashes of arcs and lines and dots.

She was several pages in when Dean remarked casually, mischief sparkling in his green eyes, "Not sure what the ink is, though, so you might wanna wash your hands when you're done."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

It was slow going, and although Dean had copied several of the symbols from his book into a well-worn journal, nothing seemed to be jumping out at him as especially promising. Jody wasn't of much help. Where she couldn't read the text in her book, it was just as likely she'd pass over the very thing they needed and never even know it. It was frustrating to say the least.

"You can really read these?" she remarked. She'd pushed the book he'd given her aside and had grabbed another off the stack, but it was equally as useless.

He shrugged dismissively. "Kinda a job requirement," he answered, his gaze still fixed on the page he was reading intently. "I get by okay. Sam, on the other hand, knows it forward and backward, the geek."

Before Jody could make a comment on that, he continued. "Dad had all these notebooks filled with passages from books he'd read. The Latin was on one line and the translation was right below it. Don't know who'd done it for him. Probably Bobby. One day, Sammy got his hands on one of 'em. I think he was five. Dad was at the laundromat or something, and Sammy and I were in the motel room. I was reading a comic book and Sammy… he shoved the book right under my nose and said, 'Read this to me.'

"Well, I freaked. Dad didn't like us getting into his things. Especially, his books and research and stuff. He'd have autopsy reports and crime scene photos tucked into the pages of his books, nice, full color glossy shots of vics with their chests torn open. Stuff like that would'a given Sammy nightmares for days. That's why he didn't leave that stuff lyin' around when he wasn't there. He didn't want Sammy to know about any of it. God only knows how he'd found it. And I was supposed to be watchin' him, so it was gonna be my ass if Dad found out."

Jody suppressed the cringe she could feel creeping across her face. He wasn't looking at her, was keeping his gaze decidedly on the page in front of him as though to _keep_ from looking at her, but she didn't want to risk him seeing her displeasure. So much responsibility thrust on such young shoulders, and the implication was glaring: Sammy, at five, might have been shielded from the worst of the horrors, but Dean, at nine, had not. How much younger had he been exposed to the truth? Eight? Seven? Six? Younger still?

"Before I could grab it out of his hand and put it back where he found it, Dad walks in," he continued, a small smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. "Sammy grabs the notebook and runs over to Dad and announces all pleased as punch that _I'm_ gonna read it to him. I thought I was gonna be running laps around the motel 'til I puked. But Dad just stood there with this look on his face. Next thing I know, Sammy and I are side by side on the beat-up couch and I'm reading that damn notebook out loud while Dad's doing who knows what at the table. I'm trippin' over the words and Dad's correcting me, and Sammy is soaking it up like a friggin' sponge. After that, every night he'd pick a page and make us stumble through it.

"I hated it, but Sammy… He wasn't really reading the Latin at that point, of course, just memorizing the words when he heard 'em and… I don't know. Maybe, matchin' it up to the English words below. Who knows? Like I said, he was a sponge. He'd walk around the room and point to stuff and want to know what the funny word was for it, like there'd be a Latin word for television, microwave, or Magic Fingers. And you should'a seen the fit he threw in a McDonald's one night because there was no word for Chicken McNuggets and French Fries."

He laughed, but his eyes got that far away nostalgic look in them. "When we got a little older, Dad started dropping us off at Bobby's for a weekend or sometimes even a whole week, while he was off hunting. Bobby had a bunch of old storybooks written in Latin. Dad wasn't gonna let us slack off just 'cause he wasn't there, so Bobby started readin' those to Sammy at night. By the time Sammy was seven or eight, he could read them himself."

Time had dulled some of the pain, though certainly not all of it. Bobby had started to mean something to her, and, she liked to think, she to him when he'd died, and she'd spent too many nights in those first several months after his death wondering exactly what it was she'd lost. There had been so much about him that she hadn't known. To have this side of the gruff, old codger revealed, however… she wanted Dean to keep talking no matter how much it hurt.

Dean fell silent, though, his expression distant. He'd never looked up from the page the whole time he'd spoke, but he hadn't left it, either, his whole body frozen in the hold of the memory. For her part, Jody was speechless, and, so help her, if she started crying again… Dean shook himself, then, clearing his throat with a note of embarrassment. He cast her a quick sideways glance then turned to the next page in the book.

Any hope of more anecdotal stories of their past was dashed when his cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. "The ME," was all he said as he bolted to his feet. He was out of the room before he even answered the call.

Jody watched him leave with a tight feeling in her chest. _Please_ , she thought. _Let it be good news._

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

"Mason died an hour ago."

Jody looked up at the level, almost unaffected sound of his voice, wondering if maybe she'd misheard him. One look at his face told her she hadn't. His eyes were cold, a seething, impotent anger brewing beneath their surface. He clutched his cell phone in one tight fist. She resisted the urge to take it from his hand before he crushed it. Or, threw it through her dining room window.

She didn't offer him an apology. She didn't dare. He looked like the slightest provocation might set him off and she needed him calm for Sammy's sake if none other. "He was victim number five," she said instead, her voice sounding much steadier than she felt.

A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Yeah. Doc said it was like his battery just ran outta juice."

That made Jody sit up straighter. "Like he was still being drained?"

He looked at her sharply. "No. That sonuvabitch is _dead_. He ain't draining anybody anymore. _Trust me_."

There was a challenge in the way he said that. One she didn't deserve, law officer or not. It dared her to probe further, to ask for details and specifics, to be a _cop_ and just _try_ to make him confess. It was his anger talking; she knew that. It didn't make it hurt any less.

"We wouldn't be here right now if I didn't," she reminded him. She hadn't intended the reproach to come out so strongly. They were both starting to feel the stress.

To his credit, he winced. "You're right. I'm sorry. It's just…" He raised his fist and once again, she feared for the fate of his cell phone. Perhaps, he did, too. He tossed it on the table toward the stack of books. "I'm not doing any good here, Jody," he said. "If I missed something… Dammit, I'm not gonna find it sitting here."

"And if it's hidden with one of those _don't look at me_ spells," she pointed out.

He threw both arms up in the air and turned his back on her.

"Dean."

He didn't turn around, just clutched at his hair with both hands.

"Dean!"

"I know." He dropped his arms, his hands slapping against his thighs like their strings had been cut.

"What else did the ME say?"

He sighed, then turned around to face her again. He hesitated, seemed to chew on the inside of his cheek as he came to some decision or another. The process didn't cycle across his face, she noticed, not like it did Sam's when he was gnawing on some internal dilemma. As long as he still wasn't contemplating walking out that door…

He gave his head a subtle shake. He sighed again and headed toward the kitchen, snagging his empty coffee mug—then hers at her nod—off the table as he passed. "Mason was in rougher shape when we found him, so…" His voice trailed off as he refilled their mugs. Maybe, it wasn't a surprise that he'd died, but that didn't make his death easier to accept for either of them. "But she thinks Danielson might be improving. Hard to tell, though, when she don't know what's wrong with him in the first place."

He set Jody's mug down on the table, but he didn't join her, too keyed up to stop moving. He made a slow circuit around the table.

"Feds are still sniffin' around," he continued, "but she did some fancy talking and they're leavin' her alone. Told me not to ask, so I didn't. I'm tellin' you. This ain't her first case 'a weird."

"Let's hope that means that when we do find what we're looking for, we can pass the info onto her."

He made a face at that and Jody resigned herself to another argument _when_ —there would be no _if_ in this—they found what they were looking for. She reached for another book off the pile and flipped it open. More spidery script and arcane symbols. More words she couldn't read. She pushed it aside in frustration. How the hell many books on the subject did they need?

"What else did she say?" Jody asked reaching for another book, not that she expected to be able to read it any better than the first two. She flipped it open…

"I don't believe it."

She looked up. Dean stood at the end of the table sifting through the small pile of Sammy's drawings with an increasingly incredulous look on his face.

"What?"

"No friggin' way," he replied unhelpfully. He pulled out one drawing and slapped it down on the table. It was just a series of squiggles and slash marks across the page, certainly nothing as identifiable as the picture Sammy had drawn of the Impala a few days earlier. Dean pulled out another and then a third and slapped them down beside the first with equal force. They contained more of the same: odd squiggles, swirls, and slashes of greens and oranges and yellows and reds. She met Dean's intense gaze with one of confusion.

The sigh was pure impatience. "He was drawing these this morning," he said. Two more drawings joined the three already on the table. "I wasn't even paying attention."

"And?" Jody reached over and pulled the drawings closer, spinning them around, not that there seemed to be an obvious up or down to them. Aside from the colors, there didn't seem to be anything similar about them, either, just random marks on the page.

Or were they?

She turned one of the drawings ninety degrees. In the center of the page, mostly obscured by a spaghetti-tangle of green squiggles, there were four fiery slashes. If she was looking at it correctly, it sort of resembled a flat-topped **3** : a horizontal slash running left to right, a diagonal slash running from top right to bottom left, and a curved slash running from midway through the diagonal line to form the bottom. Bisecting the first two lines, however, was a fourth, crescent-shaped slash.

Sammy had retraced the marks several times, starting with his red crayon, then orange, then yellow, and when Jody looked at the other drawings Dean had slid toward her, she found the same symbol drawn with the same colors.

She looked up at Dean. "You don't suppose…"

He returned her gaze then looked toward the living room where his little brother played silently. Suddenly, he grabbed several of the drawings off the table and headed to his brother. Jody bolted after him.

"Sammy, buddy," she heard Dean say gently.

He knelt on the floor beside the couch. Sammy lay on his side under his old army blanket, playing with the puppy puzzle pieces. His thumb was in his mouth, and his eyes had that glassy, sleepy look as he blinked up at Dean.

"Wanted t'ask you about your drawings," Dean said, brushing his hand through his brother's hair. Jody noticed the corner of his mouth dip down and she knew Sammy's fever was to blame.

"You wike 'em?" Sammy asked around the thumb in his mouth.

"They're awesome." A little dimple formed in Sammy's flushed cheek as he smiled. "You really like this symbol, huh?" Dean pointed to the center of the page. "I've never seen it before. Can you tell me what it means?"

Sammy's smile faded and he shrugged one shoulder. "It's in my eyes."

"In your eyes? What d'ya mean, it's in your eyes? Like, right now?"

Sammy shook his head. "Before. When I's bigger."

Dean rocked back on his heels and Jody sucked in a breath. There was no questioning their ears now, as they had the last time Sammy had referred to his _bigger_ self. He _knew_.

"Tell me, Sammy," Dean said, leaning forward again.

Sammy popped the thumb out of his mouth and huffed out a little sigh. Jody didn't like how tired he sounded. "Dere was… dere was dis big bang an'… an' my eyes, dey goes aww white an' spots. An'… an' I see dis… dis… _swish_ , _swish_ , _swish_ , _boom!_ Den, I'm not big no more."

"Oh my God," Jody gasped, her hand going to her mouth in shock.

Dean looked equally as poleaxed, but there was also this gleam of excitement building up in his posture, like he might suddenly jump to his feet and start moving. He held himself in check though. How, Jody wasn't sure. He held up the drawing and started tracing the strange symbol with his finger.

"Like this, Sammy? Swish, swish, swish," over the lines that comprised the _three_ , "and _boom?_ " over the crescent.

Sammy nodded. "Wike fire in my eyebawws." He sniffled. "I don't wike fire."

"I know, Sammy," Dean said, cupping Sammy's cheek. "Now, Sammy. This is really, really important. I need you to think really hard. Try to remember, okay?" Sammy nodded. "When you saw that flash…"

"Da swish-swish-swish-boom?"

Dean laughed. "Yeah, Sammy. When you saw the swish-swish-swish-boom, was it on the floor or… or the walls or…"

"It was in my _eyes_!" he answered impatiently.

"I know, I know. You said that," Dean hastened to calm him. "I was listening, but… but did it look like it came from the floor, y'know like when the snow is too bright to look at?"

Sammy made a face, but when he shook his head, it seemed more in confusion than negation. "Just in my eyes."

"Okay. Did it…uh. Do you remember… Was there any sound with it? Was there a noise?"

Again, Sammy made a face. At this point, any normal three-year-old would have been reaching the end of his interest with this strange question and answer session. Sammy was tiring, but Jody could see that he was trying to do as Dean had asked, wracking his fevered, not-so-little, three-year-old brain to remember something that had happened a week ago. It was asking a lot of him.

"Scrunchy," Sammy answered, opening and closing his fist in front of his face as though to demonstrate.

" _Scrunchy_?" Dean repeated.

Sammy made the gesture again. It almost looked like…

"Like when you crinkle something up before you throw it away?" Jody guessed.

Sammy barely moved his head, just his eyes swept up past Dean's shoulder to look at her. He nodded. "Wike tater chips."

"Static," Dean said. "Or, an electrical charge." He sat back on his heels and looked up at Jody. Did that tell him something? It seemed like it did, though she didn't see how.

When he didn't say anything, she pressed, "Does this help us?"

Dean blinked, seemed to come back from wherever his thoughts had drifted. "I dunno," he answered. He still seemed distracted by something. "If I can find this symbol in one of those books, maybe."

"That's assuming the symbol really looks like that."

"Why wouldn't it?"

She opened her mouth to answer that question, but checked herself at the last second. Sammy was sitting right there listening to everything, his gaze a little too sharp considering how sleepy he'd looked just a minute before. She didn't want him thinking she didn't believe him, but she knew a thing or two about the abstract nature of children's artwork, how they often drew one thing—usually something familiar—to represent something that was too complex for their limited experience to express. If this was the case here, they could end up wasting valuable time looking through all those books only to come up empty.

Even as she was thinking this and wondering how she could relay her concerns to Dean, she saw the moment he figured it out for himself. All that was missing was the little lightbulb popping up above his head. He looked down at the drawings in his hands again, then over at the pile of books on the dining room table.

"Sammy." He drew the name out slowly. She wondered if he was having the same nauseated misgivings about letting a three-year-old anywhere near those books that she was. He gave his head a slow turn from side to side then took a deep breath. "Do you think you could help me find this symbol in one of our books?"

Sammy blinked, and his eyes went wide. "I can hewp you do rechurch?" he squealed in excitement.

"If you think you're up to it," Dean answered.

In a flurry of motion, Sammy kicked off the blanket and scurried off the couch, his feet barely touching the floor before he threw his arms up in the air for Dean to pick him up. Dean's knees cracked loudly as he scooped him up and stood, settling him on his hip. He gave Jody a hopeful look, the first she'd seen on his face since he'd shown up at her doorstep Friday morning.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"Dat's it!"

Jody transferred the last grilled cheese sandwich from the skillet to the plate and yanked the plug out of the wall. She grabbed the plate and a stack of napkins and hurried into the dining room. Dean and Sammy had been looking through books for quite a while and, although Sammy had pointed out a few symbols he thought _might_ have looked _something_ like what he'd seen, this was the first time he'd sounded so excited.

"Are you sure, Sammy?" Dean asked.

"See? Swish. Swish. Swish. An' den dere was dis _BOOM!_ dat went wike _DIS!"_

Dean caught his flailing little hand before it connected with the plate Jody was setting down on the table.

Pushing the plate out of the way, she leaned over Dean's shoulder to look down at the page. As she'd feared, she didn't see anything that looked like what Sammy had drawn. Not enough that she would have found it based on his drawing alone.

As if reading her skepticism, Dean said, "They're all trinity signs. I can't believe I didn't think of that sooner." His face twisted into a grimace and he shook his head, clearly angry with himself. She resisted the urge to smack him up the side of the head. If there was one thing these two both needed to learn it was to stop being so hard on themselves.

"What are trinity signs?" she asked, more to redirect his self-castigation. She recognized a few of the symbols on the page—the rather Celtic looking three-petaled interlace and the three-legged spiral—though she didn't know what they were called, and she certainly knew about the Holy Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or Ghost depending on the particular Christian denomination.

"Trinity signs all represent aspects of three," he explained. "Like _Past, Present, Future_ ; _Birth, Life, Death_ ; _Beginning, Middle, End._ "

" _Before, Now, and After_?" she guessed.

"Exactly. They all deal with time and… and cycles, and any one of them could be used in a spellcasting that affects age."

Sammy looked up at them and smiled brightly. "D'I hewp good?"

"You sure did, buddy!" Dean pulled him close and kissed the top of his head. He pulled back suddenly. The smile faded from his face and he put the back of his hand to Sammy's cheek and then forehead. "You feelin' warm again, Sammy?"

Sammy quickly shook his head. After four days, Jody recognized his stubborn streak rearing its little head. She put her own hand to his forehead. Sure enough, he felt warmer than before. She glanced at the clock and frowned. He wasn't due for his next dose of Tylenol for another hour or so.

He pulled his head away with a pout of annoyance. "We aww done now?" There was the three-year-old attention span. It was almost a relief to hear it.

Dean shook his head. "Not yet. But you can go play if you want."

Fever or no, Sammy hopped off Dean's lap and ran back into the living room. It wasn't long before they heard the sound of wooden blocks hitting the floor. Dean stared after him, his expression troubled.

"His fever is getting worse," he said. "We're running outta time here."

She had that feeling, too. She took the seat beside him and slid the plate of sandwiches between them, though she suddenly had no appetite at all. "Did this help us?" she asked.

He didn't answer right away, his attention still fixed on his brother who they could hear talking quietly to his toys in the next room. His fever may be worsening, but he seemed a little perkier than he had before his little nap. She could only hope that was a good sign.

"Maybe." Dean answered finally. He tore his gaze away and rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "I've never seen this variation before. It's _old._ " And the way he said that spoke volumes.

"Is that bad?"

He looked up at her and shrugged. "Ain't good. Takes some serious mojo to cast something like this without it blowin' up in your face."

He reached over, grabbed one of the sandwiches off the plate, and took a bite. At least his appetite seemed intact. "Y' know, I knew Sam couldn't draw for shit, but these aren't even close." He shook his head.

"Actually, it makes a lot of sense," she said. "You said the spell de-aged him, right? It didn't just de-age his body. I mean, that's not _Sam_ stuck in a three-year-old's body. He's really three."

"Yeah," he agreed around his next mouthful.

She rose and went to the kitchen to get him something to drink. "Yet, Sammy is remembering things that haven't happened to him yet." She poured two tall glasses of milk and carried them back, setting one down on the table in front of him. If he objected to the offering, he didn't let on, just accepted it and washed down his mouthful. "Which means some of Sam's memories are still in there."

"Comforting thought."

She couldn't argue with that. "So, it's not uncommon for children to draw one thing to represent something else entirely. I've seen children draw pictures of snarling dogs or trees with teeth. Scary dogs and monsters, they can understand. An abusive step-dad…" She didn't need to finish that thought. "Sam's the one who would have seen that symbol when it went off, but Sammy's the one who's remembering it now."

"An' while Sam might have recognized it as a trinity sign of some kind…" Dean began thoughtfully.

"Sammy only knows it's a three."

"Not just a three," he said around his next bite. "But a three with an extra component. If he'd'a drawn a four on those pages…" He shook his head. He fell silent and Jody let him study the page without interruption.

"Well, the _good_ news is," he said after a few minutes.

"There's good news?"

He nodded, his smile growing. "If Sammy is right and this is exactly what it looked like…" He tapped his finger over the symbol Sammy had identified, a repeating triad of interlacing swirls radiating out from a central geometric shape with a single contrasting shape bisecting two of the three legs. "Our douchebag he-witch wasn't a stray-from-the-programming kinda guy."

"Meaning?"

His smile grew even wider. "Meaning, we can reverse it."

Jody felt her own smile stretch her lips, her heart jumped a little in her chest in bittersweet relief. Then, she realized what he'd said. "And the _bad_ news?"

He gave her a bit of an impish wink. "I'm gonna have to draw on your floor."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


	10. Chapter 10

**~~~~~Chapter 10~~~~~**

( _Tuesday 1:00PM_ )

Dean had pulled out his phone and snapped off several pictures of the symbols in the book, both the one Sammy had picked out and another Dean claimed was its inverse or counter symbol. As he'd explained, sometimes simply knowing what you were looking for was enough to nullify a conceal spell, even for someone as steeped in Science as Forensics.

He'd pushed himself to his feet. "Well," he'd said dialing his phone and putting it up to his ear. "Here's where we find out if good ol' Dr. Michales is as X-Files as I think she is."

With Dean off conversing with the ME, a contact he seemed particularly bent on keeping to himself if the way he kept leaving the room to talk to her was any indication, there was little for Jody to do but wait. She grabbed the deck of cards and the small Ziploc bag of pennies and went into the living room.

She didn't have to say a word. Sammy took one look at what she set down on the coffee table and he scurried over to join her settling on the floor between her legs. She arranged the cards in their grid pattern while Sammy aligned his pile of pennies into neat, orderly rows, each one heads up with Abe Lincoln gazing off to the right.

Every so often, he leaned his head against Jody's leg and, in true Pavlovian fashion, her hand went to his hair or to the side of his face every damn time. She knew he was doing it on purpose, like a frisky puppy that repeatedly shoved its nose under your hand so you'd scratch its ears. It was just as effective a ploy for Sammy as it was for the puppy, probably for much the same reason. His happiness was contagious, and so easy to achieve, just a kind touch and a moment of her attention.

They were just four cards into their game when Dean walked in to the room. "Well, now we… What are you playing?"

Sammy looked up from where he'd just placed his penny on the ten of hearts. "Da Matchy Checker game!"

There was so much excitement in his voice, Dean pulled up short. He fingered his cellphone absently, seemingly frozen where he stood. "You…you know that game?"

Sammy giggled. "You teached it to me."

"I know, I just…" A slow smile spread across his face. "You remember that?"

Sammy nodded. "An', I teached it to Dody, so—so we could pway." He dipped his head and looked up at Dean through his hair. "Dat okay?" He sounded worried. Did he really think Dean would be mad?

"Sure, Sammy. Why wouldn't it be?"

One little shoulder went up. "Cuz, it 'post'a be our game, but…"

"Dude, you can play the game with whoever you want."

That picked Sammy's head up. "I can?"

"Sure."

Sammy's head tipped to one side. "I wanna pway wiff you!"

As manipulations went, that one was pretty smooth. So smooth, Jody couldn't even feel hurt that she was being pushed aside. How could she? It was Dean. He would always be Sammy's first choice in everything. That was obvious and inevitable, and getting upset by that was like getting upset by the sun rising or setting. It was a force of nature that could no more be altered than it could be stopped, except by a force a hell of a lot more cosmic than her.

Dean shifted his feet, his gaze flicking to her. "You're already playing with Jody," he said, giving her a shrug that could only be an apology.

Sammy huffed dramatically, rolling his little mop-head. "I wanna pway wiff you, _TOO!_ "

If Dean could say no to that, he was made of sterner stuff than Jody had seen so far. Still, he seemed to balk until she patted the cushion beside her in invitation and said, "Park it!" as though he'd needed the order to make it all right.

She split the deck in her hand in half and slid the pile over to him, while Sammy repositioned himself so he was between them. He looked up at her once, his smile so damn big it nearly took over his whole face, then he looked up at Dean. She had no doubt his smile was even bigger.

Whatever Dean had discussed with Dr. Michales took a back seat. It was probably nothing they wanted to talk about in front of Sammy, anyway. Dean's cell phone went onto the end table, close by but unobtrusive, and he gathered up his stack of cards.

"I can't believe you remember this game," he said as he flipped over the top card for Sammy to see. "You'd just turned three when I taught it to you." He looked at Jody. "We were stuck in this hole-in-the-wall motel during a hurricane or monsoon or… I don't know. One of those storms that drops so much rain so fast the roads all flood. Sammy was bored 'cause we had t'leave all our stuff in the car, but every time Dad tried to go out to get it, Sammy freaked out."

"Him might'a fwowed away," Sammy interjected matter-of-factly, dropping his penny on a six of clubs to match the color of Dean's card.

Dean mussed Sammy's hair. "Luckily, there was this bookshelf in the room with a few old paperbacks, a deck of cards, and a beat up box of random game pieces: coupl'a dice, half dozen checkers, bunch of marbles, and a set of jacks—like I was gonna let Sammy play with _those!_ Dad was beat, so he told me to keep Sammy busy while he caught some Zs."

"So, you came up with this?" Jody asked, impressed. She drew a card from her pile—a king of diamonds—and set it down in front of Sammy.

"Hey, I was _seven_ ," he said, defensively, clearly missing her point.

She shook her head. "And pretty damn clever, at that."

"Dee's vewy smart," Sammy agreed as he studied the layout of cards for a place to put his penny. There were only four red cards remaining, but only one was a diamond.

"Sure. You say that now," Dean teased.

Sammy's hand froze over the three of diamonds, and he looked up at Dean. "Do I say dat before?"

Dean's face fell. "What?"

"You say, I say dat _now._ "

There was little change in the inflection in Sammy's voice, more curiosity than building distress, but Jody felt herself grow tense. The last time he'd hesitated like that, he'd thrown his penny across the room and dissolved into a fit of tears that had lasted for the rest of the day. There had been no lead up to it then, just a sudden explosion of emotion. Was he about to break down again?

Dean shook his head. "Whadiya mean, _before_? Before what?"

Sammy sighed. "Before, when I's…" From where Jody sat, most of Sammy's profile was concealed by his hair. What little she could see without invading Dean's personal space was twisting up into a little pout. "B'fore dat's not _now._ "

Dean leaned forward. Jody felt herself doing the same and had to stop herself. She didn't want to intrude.

"Sammy?" There was that tone to Dean's voice she'd only ever heard him use when addressing his brother, gentle and soft; but it belied the anxious look in his eyes. "What…what do you remember about…about _before_?"

For a second, Sammy didn't move. Jody held her breath and she could hear Dean do the same. Then, the penny fell from Sammy's hand, or maybe he dropped it. It caught its edge and rolled across several cards until it came to rest against another penny. It drew his attention for only a second, but then he looked back up at Dean.

"Dee, my head hurts," he said softly.

The breath punched out of Dean's throat. He closed his eyes and nodded in disappointment—or was that _relief?_ Jody wasn't really sure. Dropping his cards on the table, Dean opened his arms and took Sammy up into his lap. He cupped his hand to the side of Sammy's face and dropped his cheek to the top of his brother's head.

"That's 'cause you've got a fever."

But Jody wasn't so sure that was the reason. Not anymore, or at least not entirely. She'd seen the signs long before his fever had spiked, the little V of pain that formed between his brows whenever he talked about his past. No. _Sam's_ past.

Sammy was remembering more and more, lately; recalling specific events and details, not just vague concepts that were open for interpretation. He certainly remembered being _bigger_. There was no denying that, no dismissing it for anything other than cold, hard fact. He'd said it outright, more than once. He remembered being bigger, but was that the same as him remembering _being_ Sam?

Jody had a feeling it was.

Now, she just had to convince Dean.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"Dean, I think…"

"Sammy remembers being Sam?"

Okay, that wasn't quite the way she'd thought this conversation was going to go.

Within thirty minutes of his last dose of Tylenol, Sammy had finally dropped off to sleep. Dean hadn't wanted to leave him unattended, but Jody had insisted they'd needed to talk, and _not_ where Sammy might overhear. She hadn't really given much thought about what she was going to say once she had him out of the room, half-afraid Dean was going to lash out and call her twelve kinds of crazy. She certainly hadn't expected him to be right there on the same page.

That was a good place to be, though it didn't seem like Dean thought so. "Yeah, I got that," he finished sarcastically. "Though, it would be nice if there was enough of _Sam_ in there to help on this damn case. I mean, he's the one who'd figured out what was going on in the first place."

"Even if he does remember, he's still only a three-year-old." She leaned against the counter watching him pace the kitchen from corner to corner like a caged animal, staying out of his path as much as physically possible in such a small space.

"A three-year-old who knows he was once a thirty-year-old," he retorted, as though that point needed clarification. "God, how'd this case get so fucked up?"

She certainly didn't have the answer to that question. He stopped with his back to her and raked his fingers through his hair, threading them together behind his skull. She could hear him breathing from across the room.

"You know," he said, his voice strained. "All this time, he's never once asked me why I'm an adult."

That was a surprise to her. "Not once?"

He shook his head. "He was unconscious for six hours. Longest friggin'…" He took a deep breath and dropped his hands. He looked at her over his shoulder. "And, when he woke up, first word outta his mouth was, Dean. He just knew."

He chuckled, turning around and leaning his back against the refrigerator. "I thought the spell had just changed his body, y'know? Hell, I almost started laughing. Gigantor stuffed down inside of that little body. "

His smile fell away, not that there had been all that much humor in it. "I was kinda hoping that's all it was, but… But then he asked where our dad was and…uh…and why he wasn't there. Where'd he go? When was he coming back? Did something happen to him? And he kept getting more and more upset. Next thing I knew, he was crying and locked onto me like a leech, and…" He shook his head. "Suddenly, all I could see were those dead kids in the morgue."

He closed his eyes and thumped his head back against the refrigerator. "God, what if he's been remembering this whole time."

He sounded so concerned and she couldn't really blame him. It was a disarming thought, and one she'd had every time Sammy had looked at her with just a little too much _worldliness_. She may not know _what_ they had experienced in their thirty-plus years of life, what horrors or pain they'd lived through, but she knew it had left scars. There were times she'd seen things flash across Sam's face that had reminded her of war vets and trauma victims. She'd seen his eyes go distant, as if he were seeing things that weren't there, reliving things behind his eyes that no one should have had to live once let alone again and again like a movie set on loop.

For an adult to have such memories was terrible enough. For a child to have them, though… She had first-hand knowledge of how the body could respond to memories best left buried. How much worse could it be to have those memories and not understand why?

"Dean, look," she said, trying to pick her words carefully. "We know that Sammy's been pulling up things from Sam's past for days." When Dean nodded, she continued. "And, yeah, some of them are from Sam's memories of when he was little, like your father and Bobby, which would make sense if the spell turned back time on _Sam_. Those memories are current to Sammy's timeline. But... _Crowley_? _Me?_ These are a lot more recent to _Sam_."

Again, Dean nodded. "Yeah."

"The other day, Sammy told me he had a dog named Bones." Something flashed in Dean's eyes, but he said nothing. "When I asked how old he was, he said it was when he was bigger. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Hell, Owen used to say things like that all the time, things like, 'Once, when I was bigger, I had a race car."

Even as the words were leaving her mouth, she braced herself for the pain that always came at the mere thought of her son or the mention of his name, and she pushed it down. Now was not the time.

"Sam was fifteen," Dean said, confirming what Sammy had indicated with his fingers at the time. He didn't offer anything more than that and Jody didn't press.

Instead, she just shook her head. "That's what he said. I thought he was just making up stories."

"But?"

She sighed. "But right after… He got this look on his face, like he was in pain."

She tapped her forehead, affecting a scowl that pulled her brows down. Recognition lit in Dean's eyes. "Like just now."

"Yeah. The minute I asked him if his head hurt, it went away. He went back to playing like nothing had happened."

Dean pushed himself off the refrigerator and resumed pacing, his long legs eating up the tile in a few strides. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor as he passed her, his expression thoughtful. "The day his fever started," he asked suddenly. "You were pretty certain on the phone that it wasn't related to the spell. And then… The things Sammy said to me…What did he remember then?"

Jody cursed. She should have known she was going to have to tell him about Sammy's nightmare eventually. When Dean hadn't asked about Sammy's little outburst the second he'd walked in the door, she'd thought she'd dodged a bullet. It wasn't as if the information was going to be crucial to the case. All it was going to do was upset Dean, and she really didn't want to do that if it wasn't necessary.

But what if she'd been wrong? What if it had been relevant? What if the nightmare Sammy had had _was_ actually a memory of Sam's? Could it help them?

"Jody?"

She sighed. "The night you didn't call… Sammy had been having a rough day already and…that night he had a terrible nightmare. Woke up screaming and…" Just the memory of that heart-stopping cry yanking her out of a dead sleep had her heart pounding in her chest. She wondered if she'd ever get the image of his terror-filled eyes staring up at the ceiling out of her head.

Dean had stopped mid-step, his back still to her and his fists clenched at his sides. "Did he…did he say what it was about?"

His voice sounded calm, but she suspected it was all an act. Nothing about his rigid posture denoted calm at all. She wished he'd turn around. She didn't like talking to his back from across the room any more than she'd enjoyed talking to the top of Sam's head from across the table, resisting the urge to duck down beneath his hair—or in Dean's case, to take him by the arms and turn him around—just to see his face.

"Something about a fire," Jody said carefully, watching him intently, "and a girl up—"

"Oh, God." He staggered forward a step, his hand slapping out against the edge of the counter as though to catch himself. She took a step toward him, but he threw out his other hand to stop her. "Did he…uhm… Did he say who she was?"

"No." It was all she could do not to go to him. "Just that she was very frightened."

She could hear him draw a deep breath then release it.

"Dean? Do you know who he was talking about?"

A laugh punched out of him, utterly devoid of humor. If anything, it sounded a little manic.

"So, that _was_ another memory." She'd hoped it wasn't, not directly anyway, but Dean's reaction was answer enough. She wanted to ask about it and, at the same time, she knew she didn't want to know the details. It was bad enough that _they_ knew them, that they had experienced something she just _knew_ was worse than what she was imagining. "More recent to Sam than the dog?" she asked instead. It seemed a safe enough question.

Dean's shoulders lifted then fell with his breath, but he finally looked at her over his shoulder. "Probably."

" _Probably?_ "

He sighed. "Most likely." Before she could repeat that equally-as-cryptic response, he said, "Don't. Please." He pushed himself off the counter, turned around, and leaned his weight back against it. He looked a little pale and, maybe, a little haunted, too.

"His fever started a few hours later," she said instead.

"And the stuff he said to me when I did call?" Dean asked. "About me being mad at him?"

Jody shook her head. "He said the same thing right after his nightmare. That he'd 'done bad things', and that you weren't coming back because you were mad at him."

Dean rubbed his face with both hands. He mumbled something into his palms, but Jody couldn't make out any of it. Even the tone was indiscernible. She still couldn't imagine what Sammy had been talking about, if what constituted "bad things" to a three-year-old even came close to the truth that might have been buried in Sam's memories.

Something told her that Dean wasn't so clueless, that he knew exactly what Sammy was remembering.

When he dropped his hands, his game face was back. "It's not important," he said, meeting her eyes resolutely. "We've both fucked up and done things we ain't proud of. And sometimes…" He chuckled. "A lot of times, we've pissed each other off enough to make one of us walk away for a while."

Jody nodded. She knew how they had lived their whole lives in each other's back pocket. Bobby may have held his cards close to the vest about those two, but he'd told her that much. It only made sense that two people so intertwined would occasionally fight. She had a hunch he was downplaying things a bit, but if he said it wasn't important, she had to take his word for it.

"So, these are still just Sam's memories," she said.

He huffed out another one of those humorless laughs. " _Just._ " He shook his head. "Believe me, the shit Sam's got in his head, the stuff he's been through… Sammy can't remember this stuff, Jody. He just can't. He'll never survive it. No kid could. And it's only a matter of time before those memories start seeping in. Doesn't matter how much Sam might have buried them."

"Then, what are we waiting for?"

There was the question she'd wanted to ask him all along, the question she'd pulled him out of the living room and away from Sammy so she could ask him without Sammy hearing. All the other things they'd been discussing, however important they might have been in their own isolated and distinct way, this was the question that mattered.

So, why was Dean shaking his head at her as though she was asking him to dangle Sammy out a third-story window?

"You said it yourself," she barreled on before the resistance she could see building up in Dean's posture could spill out of his mouth. "We may be running out of time with this. Whether Sammy's fever is related to the spell or a product of the stress he's under because of all the terrible memories you say Sam has rattling around in his head, is moot. It's not going down. And it's probably not going to _go_ down unless we can undo this spell."

He opened his mouth to comment and she threw a finger up in front of his face to forestall him. It was testament to his regard—his _respect_ —for her that it actually worked. He snapped his mouth shut, but he was not happy about it. She could see it in that cold, green-eyed stare.

"Sammy saw the symbol that changed him," she continued. "You said there was an inverse to it that could reverse the spell. You need to draw it on my floor to do it? Fine! Draw it on my floor. Hardwood can be sanded. _Hell!_ I'll throw a carpet over it and let the next owners worry about it."

"And then what?" he hissed. "Just ask the three-year-old to walk through the weird-ass symbol on the floor? What the hell do I tell him when he asks me why? 'Cause, you just know he's gonna ask. He's gonna ask a shit ton of questions, and what the hell am I supposed to tell him, Jody? 'Cause, if this works, he's…"

He didn't need to say it. Jody knew. She'd gone to bed the night before with that very thought twisting a fist around her heart. If it worked, then _Sammy_ would be gone. He'd simply cease to exist. Once again, he put his back to her, but not before she saw the anguish in his eyes. It probably mirrored what was in her own.

"And what if he's wrong?" he continued in that same quiet, anguished voice.

"What?"

"What if it isn't the right symbol? Or, if the symbol isn't enough?" He let out a sigh that seemed to draw the strength right out of his shoulders. "I've been telling him his whole life that I won't let anything bad happen to him, and when the time came to prove it, it was a friggin' lie. I don't know that I can just tell him it's gonna be okay when I…when I just don't know that it will."

"That's every parent's worry. You gonna tell me that every time you told him that, you _knew_ , beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be okay? Seriously? You _knew_ that when you told him that on the phone just a few days ago?"

He turned his head to the side, his eyes catching hers for only a second before he dropped his gaze to the floor. "That ain't the same as…as tellin' him it's safe for him to walk across the road when you know there might be a landmine under it."

"And if there's something on his side of the road that you _know_ is going to harm him if he stays there…?"

She let the question dangle, knowing that she didn't really have to spell this out for him. He knew the score. He'd probably had to face this very scenario, in all its many and varied permutations, more times than she could even guess. He must have done something right. They were both still alive and walking, albeit, cracked and glued in places, but still functioning.

"You lie to mitigate the fear," he answered, as if reciting the words from rote. He looked up at her again, and she saw something shift across his face, something bitter. "And then Sam kicks your ass for the next month for not trusting him to make his own decisions."

That something bitter, shifted again, became more resignation than resentment. He grew thoughtful, his gaze drifting back to the floor between them. "You really think Sam is in there?" he asked then. His fists opened and closed at his side. The rest of his body was rigid.

Jody blew out a breath. "I think..." she started, watching him closely. "I think Sammy knows that something isn't right. That _he_ isn't right." His eyes narrowed slightly, a sudden flash of pain that she could only chalk up as one more trigger from their past that she would probably never know. "I think he may understand a lot more of what's going on and what's at stake than either of us are giving him credit for."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

She followed him back into the living room, hanging back a bit so as not to crowd him too much. He had the look of a man walking to the gallows, jaw clenched and shoulders straight, resigned and determined to maintain what little control over a situation that hadn't been in his control since the start. Sammy slept fitfully on his side, his chubby cheeks flush with fever and his brow pulled low in pain or distress. He clutched the edge of the army blanket in one tight fist as if it were a lifeline. Maybe it was, the only secure piece of a home that was constantly shifting and changing around him.

Or, maybe it just smelled of Dean, she thought, remembering that month when Owen had taken to carrying around one of Sean's sweatshirts everywhere he went.

Dean knelt on the floor in front of the couch and gently brushed Sammy's hair away from eyes. "Hey, buddy. Can you wake up?"

Sammy screwed up his face and burrowed deeper into the blanket. The little stuffed tiger popped out from beneath his cheek where it had been hiding and Dean gave it a playful tug until Sammy's eyes cracked open. He made a little sound of protest, pulling the tiger back into his chest. One arm eked out of the cocoon of the blanket so he could grind at his eyes with his fist.

"We weavin' now?" he asked in a small, distressed voice. It was telling that Sammy always seemed to jump to that conclusion. Even half-awake and feverish, it was the first thing he thought.

Dean shook his head. "Nah, Sammy. I just need to talk to you, is all."

He pushed himself to his feet, carefully scooping Sammy up, blanket and all, and sat down on the couch, positioning Sammy on his lap in such a way that he could see his face. It put them both so Jody couldn't really see their faces without stepping further into the room. As tempting as it was, she didn't want to intrude more than necessary. Dean hadn't asked her to leave, so she wasn't leaving, but she could give him that small bit of privacy, a quiet supportive presence in the wings in case he faltered.

"You sad, Dee?" Sammy asked. He reached out and touched his fingers to Dean's face, offering comfort the way Dean always did for him.

Dean leaned into the touch. "A little." He shifted himself on the couch and brought his face closer to Sammy's level. Once again, Jody was impressed with Dean's seemingly unconscious body language: always so careful not to loom over Sammy despite their obvious size difference. "You see… there was this…this really bad man and he…hurt some people. That's why I had to bring you to stay with Jody. So, I could find him and make him stop."

Sammy tipped his head. "But you catched him, wight?" It wasn't really a question, despite the slight lift in his voice at the end. "Dat why you came back."

"Yeah, Sammy. I did. I stopped him so…so he can't hurt anyone else ever again. But…you see, he…uh…" He looked up and caught Jody's eye for a second. She could only nod her head in weak encouragement. "Some of the things he did…well, they didn't… _undo_ , and people are still… _sick_."

"Sick?" Sammy repeated the word slowly and Jody could hear the little gears turning. "Wike me?" There was far too much depth to that simple question for a three-year-old. If Jody had had any remaining doubt that Sammy knew what was going on around him, it was gone now.

Dean pulled in a breath, and Jody had to stop herself from stepping into the room. "Yeah," he said. "Sick, like you, only worse. And I…I think I know how to fix it, to make them bet— _well_ , again, but…"

Jody could see Sammy's distress building, his small shoulders beginning to rise and fall beneath the blanket. She could hear the faint whistle as he inhaled and exhaled through the congestion building in his little nose. She didn't need to see his face to know his eyes were filling with tears, and her heart thumped hard in her chest at what the sight had to be doing to Dean.

" _You_ weavin'?" he asked.

"What? No. Sammy, I swear." Dean cupped Sammy's small face in both hands. He leaned so far over, his forehead was a mere inch from Sammy's. "I'm not goin' anywhere. I promise."

Sammy made one sharp shuddery gasp. "Am _I_ weavin'?"

"No, Sam—"

Sammy was shaking his head, the movement so emphatic that Dean had to pull his head back or risk a forehead to the bridge of the nose. "You gonna fix me, an' den I gonna weave! I don't wanna weave! I wike it here!"

It was such a mundane fear, taken at face value. Jody could almost convince herself that there was nothing uncanny about it. They were staying at Jody's because he was sick. Once he was well again, they didn't need to stay. Sammy liked it there. He'd said it so many times, to both of them. That's all it was. Nothing to see here, folks.

Except, that wasn't all this was. And they both knew it.

"God, Sammy," Dean uttered, hugging his brother close. "You _do_ know, don't you? That you're not supposed to be like this?"

"But you wike me wike dis," Sammy said, his voice small and shaky. "You wittwe brodder."

Dean made a small, choked-off sound. He pressed his lips to the crown of Sammy's head and started rocking him. Jody wondered if he even knew he was doing it. "Sammy, you're always gonna be my little brother."

Sammy shook his head. "Not when I's bigger."

"Even when you're bigger than me."

"But you wike me _better_ wike dis," he said quite definitively.

Dean drew back so he could look at Sammy's face. Jody could see the tear tracks on his cheeks before Dean wiped them off with a gentle swipe of his thumb.

"You do!" Sammy said again.

"Sammy, listen to me. I wish you could stay like this forever. I really do. Just be a little kid who can play in the snow and make chocolate chip cookies and…and puzzles and play games and…and just have fun. And it's not because I like you _better_ this way. It's because you're _happy_ , so of course I'm gonna like it. But you being like this… what if this is what's making you sick?"

"'Cuz I 'post'a be bigger?"

"Yeah. You remember the symbol you showed me?"

"In Bobby's stinky book?"

Dean chuckled, and Jody couldn't help but smile at that, too. "Yeah. You said you saw it and then you weren't big anymore." Sammy nodded his head. "Well, I think, maybe, someone else saw it, too. And now he's little."

"Wike me?"

"Just like you," Dean agreed. "And he's sick, too; but like really, really sick."

"Is him gonna get better?" Sammy asked, his breath hitching in sharply.

"I don't know, Sammy. If we can figure out how to reverse what made him little… maybe. I was actually hoping you would be willing to help me with that."

Sammy seemed to think about this, his little face twisting into a contemplative scowl. "I telled you what I saw."

"I know, Sammy," Dean cupped his cheek with one hand. "And that was a big help. Huge, even. You did real good. But I still need your help."

"You gonna make me bigger?"

"I'm sorry, but I have to."

Sammy huffed a little sigh, then leaned back into Dean's chest. Dean's arms tightened around him and he dropped his cheek onto Sammy's head. He resumed the gentle rocking motion. "When we bigger, we won't be sick no more?" Sammy asked softly.

Dean caught Jody's eye over Sammy's head. "I hope so, Sammy."

Another small sniffle, and Sammy said, "'Kay."

Dean closed his eyes and pressed his face into Sammy's curls. "Thank you, Sammy." 

_~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

Dean held Sammy tight to his chest for several minutes after, just rocking him gently. They didn't speak, and if Sammy was still sobbing, the sound was lost in the folds of Dean's shirt.

Jody had never felt so much like an intruder in her own home as she did at that moment. Watching Dean and Sammy together, seeing the tenderness Dean showed his little brother and the almost hero-worship-level trust Sammy showed him, Jody didn't dare move from her spot lest she break the tableau before her and shatter the delicate moment. She knew what a rare gift she'd been given to see it, to be brought into their tight, exclusive circle of confidence. She didn't delude herself that she'd have been privy to so much if the situation had been less dire.

When Dean finally looked up at her, she was surprised to see him so unguarded and raw. His brows pinched above his eyes and his jaw clenched. Determination was in every line of his handsome face, but so was pain. She knew that pain. It was grief and anguish and the underlying anger at the unfairness of life that bad shit had to happen no matter how undeserving the victim.

She thought he was going to declare right there and then that, _No!_ They weren't doing this. They were going to find a different way, somehow. Whatever it took. But then he just shook his head and slowly stood.

Sammy didn't stir. He was asleep, his head heavy against Dean's shoulder much like he'd been when they'd first arrived at her doorstep. Once again, she marveled that it had only been a few days.

"Take him," Dean said then.

She stumbled a step forward at the subtle tone of pleading in his voice and took Sammy into her arms. He made a tiny sound of protest, but settled immediately. Dean had already turned away. "I gotta get some things outta the trunk," he said as he grabbed his coat off the rack by the door.

"Dean."

He shook his head. He didn't even bother putting his coat on before he opened the front door. "Just…" With another quick shake of his head, he was out the door.

The cold lingered in the room. Jody wasn't sure it had anything to do with the snow and wind outside. She slowly sank down onto the couch, into the very spot Dean had just vacated, and pulled the old army blanket around Sammy's small body.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN ~~~~~_

An hour and a half later, Jody stood in the doorway of Sammy's bedroom. She still held him, snuggled tightly in the army blanket despite the heat radiating from his small body. His head was on her shoulder, but he was awake, watching events unfold around him with wide, sad eyes. He hadn't said a single word, not since he'd agreed to help Dean. He'd napped in Jody's arms while Dean was off doing whatever he needed to do to prepare for the spell and then he'd simply opened his eyes when Dean had returned and said, "It's time."

For all his doubts and concerns, and his claims that these things were Sam's forte, not his, Dean had made quick work of getting everything ready. He'd pushed the unnecessary furniture out of the bedroom and into the hall. Only the mattress remained, pushed up against the wall so it blocked the window. He'd even removed the bulbs from the light fixture in the ceiling, and Jody shuddered at what that precaution suggested.

That, and the row of salt on the floor at the threshold of the door.

Jody couldn't help but cringe at the sight of the three-foot-round arcane symbol adorning her hardwood floor in bright red spray paint. She'd told him to do it, after all, but that didn't mean she was happy to see it.

Dean sat back on his heels where he was putting the finishing touches on the symbol, and he looked up at Sammy. He didn't say anything, though, and Jody realized with a start that he was waiting for Sammy's opinion as if he expected the three-year-old to have some kind of supernatural knowledge about the inverse just because he'd been hit with the original. Sammy merely looked back, working the thumb in his mouth with more gusto then she'd seen previously.

Then he drew in a deep breath and let it out with a quick huff. It was such a _Sam_ thing, even Jody was hard-pressed not to take it as the confirmation Dean sought. Not that it really mattered. The last dose of Tylenol hadn't worked. Sammy's fever seemed the highest it had been so far. They were out of options and out of time to hope for a miracle. They needed to do this. Now.

Dean pushed himself to his feet and tossed the spray paint can into the open duffle bag in the corner of the room. He brushed his hands off on his jeans leaving a smear of red paint across his thigh. Three steps brought him to the threshold.

She expected him to reach for Sammy right away. He had that look in his face she'd seen before, that look of let's-just-get-this-over-with urgency. Instead, he merely balled his hands into fists by his sides.

"I called Dr. Michales," he confessed. As though he should be ashamed that he'd done it, that he'd been so desperate for an eleventh-hour miracle. She could tell by his expression, he hadn't gotten one. "She said her team didn't find anything in the basement, but they're gonna try some different light spectrums or aperture settings on the cameras or whatever. Could be another hour before they can make another stab at it. An hour she don't think Danielson has."

"It was a long shot, right?" Jody asked, but she was only placating him and he knew it. She wasn't surprised when he didn't even acknowledge the attempt.

He reached out one hand and cupped Sammy's cheek. "I'm sorry, Tiger," he told him. "I'd hoped we could wait a little longer, but…"

Sammy's arms tightened around Jody's neck and he pressed his face into her shoulder. "I don't wanna go," he whispered.

Dean snatched his hand back like he'd been scalded and the pain that flashed across his face at the rejection brought tears to Jody's eyes. The lump in her throat was all hers though. She hugged Sammy close and kissed the top of his head. "I don't want you to go, either," she told him. _Goddammit_ , how she didn't want him to go! "But Dean needs you, sweetie."

To her amazement, she felt Sammy nod. He drew back and looked at her, his pretty eyes bright with tears. He sniffed once, then ground his fist across his eyes. His mouth pulled up in that little stubborn line that was all _Sam Winchester_ , and he turned in her arms and reached out for Dean.

Dean seemed as shocked as Jody was, barely getting his hands up in time to grab Sammy out of her arms before the toddler could change his mind. But Sammy seemed quite determined. He wrapped his arms around Dean's neck and his legs around Dean's waist, and all Dean could do was hug him back. Suddenly, it was Jody who was in danger of changing her mind. She had to take a step back before she reached out to snatch him back.

"I scawed," Sammy said into Dean's neck.

"I know, Sammy," Dean told him. "But I'm gonna be right beside you the whole time. Nuthin' bad is gonna happen to you."

He looked up and caught Jody's eye over Sammy's head. She knew there were tears streaming down her face, but she gave him a nod of encouragement. The next thing she knew, she was standing out in her hallway looking at the closed door.

The weight of her empty arms was tangible, and she pulled them into her chest to clutch at the sleeves of her shirt. It was then she noticed the small stuffed tiger in her hand. She'd forgotten that Sammy had been holding it. Had he meant to leave it with her?

A sob broke loose. Then another. She staggered back another step until her back hit the wall behind her. She stood there frozen, that small, soft toy pressed to her throat, as a strange sort of pressure began to build in her ears and chest. God, was she having a heart attack?

Then she heard it. The subtle crackling of static grew louder until she could feel it in her teeth and along her skin. Something had to be going wrong. She started to push herself off the wall when suddenly there was a silent **_BOOM!_**

When she came back to her senses, she was sitting on the floor. Her ears were ringing, but she knew there hadn't been any noise. Just a sudden pulse of… energy, for lack of a better word. She tipped her head to the side and tugged on her ear lobe, forcing a yawn until her ears popped. The ringing stopped and she heard only silence.

Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, steadying herself with a hand on the wall until her balance resumed. Her legs were shaky and she stumbled as she reached out for the door of Sammy's room. As her hand closed on the doorknob, she heard a soft groan come from within the room.

"Sam?"

She froze where she stood, relieved. That was Dean's voice.

She held her breath waiting for the reply; both dread and hope in her heart.

"Dean?"

That wasn't Sammy's voice.

It was Sam's.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~  
_


	11. Chapter 11: Epilogue

**AN:** So, here it is. The final chapter. I can't believe this story is finished and posted, after two years with a lot of ups and downs, doubts, tears, and countless texts and emails to my awesome betas for encouragement and smacks up the side of the head. Often they provided one in the form of the other, and I can't thank them enough for their continued support. Thank you so much to everyone who has followed, favorited, and left reviews. Every one means so much to me. I hope this last chapter lives up to your expectations. Mwah!

 **~~~~~Epilogue~~~~~**

( _Tuesday 4:30PM)_

She'd fled to her dining room. Not her greatest hour. Even in the days after she'd lost Owen (again) and Sean, she hadn't run away from her responsibilities. Not once. It wasn't in her DNA. But there she was sitting at her dining room table with an empty shot glass and a full bottle of whiskey, having a mental conversation with a stuffed tiger about the pros and cons of filling the former until the latter was empty.

The tiger clearly didn't have an opinion, either way, or if it did, it was keeping it to itself. Strangely, she couldn't set it aside, couldn't stop running her fingers over the damp fur where Sammy's tears had soaked into the plush fibers. She looked into its tiny black button-eyes and traced the stitching that formed its nose and mouth. She twirled the short filaments that were its whiskers, trying to focus her attention on how they felt under her fingers so she wouldn't think about what had happened in the bedroom, so she wouldn't throw the little stuffed animal that had meant so much to the little boy she'd never see again, across the room.

What was she going to do with it? And with the blocks and puzzle pieces that were still scattered on her living room floor. Maybe it was better she didn't handle those things in her present state. As potential projectiles went, they would be a lot more satisfying and a lot more destructive.

An over-sized child's snowsuit hung on the peg by her back door, two little black boots set haphazardly beneath it on the rubber mud mat. She should probably start gathering those things together and stuffing them all back into the bag they'd arrived in. Marjorie had told her to donate whatever she hadn't used of the winter clothes when Jody was done with them. The boys could take it all to the drop box outside the thrift store on their way out of town. Give some other child in need the means to make snow angels in the snow on a cold March morning.

Still, she didn't move from where she sat. The shot glass remained empty and the bottle remained full. The toys remained strewn about, and the clothes exactly where they hung. The little stuffed tiger endured her absent manipulation of its tiny ears and floppy paws with all the same patient indulgence it had Sammy's tears. It knew how to do its job after all. It didn't shirk its responsibilities no matter how painful they might be. Neither did it admonish her for her circular, disorganized, and unproductive thoughts.

Oh yeah, definitely not a moment for the history books by a long shot.

The sound of a door opening and closing snapped her out of her daze. How long had she been sitting there, her thoughts spinning around uselessly in her head? One glance at the clock above the kitchen sink had her shaking her head in disgust at the amount of time lost, though she really couldn't say how much of it had been spent staring at the stuffed tiger in her hands and how much had been spent sitting dazed after the spell had knocked her on her ass.

Another door opened, then closed, and she heard the shower turn on. At least, one of them was moving about, and she had to assume that if one felt well enough to take a shower, the other had to be okay, too. Should she go check on them? Even as she wondered, she decided it was probably better to give them some space. It wasn't as if they could sneak off without her knowing. Her house wasn't that large, and they had to walk by her to get to the door.

"And, dammit, Jody," she uttered, "they're not going to find you crying into a goddamned Beanie Baby."

She pushed herself to her feet and positioned the stuffed tiger on the table in a nonchalant pose, its front paws together in the V of its back paws, and its head cocked inquisitively to the side. She grabbed the shot glass and the bottle and returned them to the cupboard. She had no doubt they be back out later, but not at 4:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Not while she still had two boys in her house who needed her help. It didn't matter how old they were.

Knowing those two boys as well as she did, she had a feeling they were going to want to be on their way as soon as they were dressed and packed. Short of cuffing them to the dining room chairs, she couldn't stop them.

And probably not even then. She'd seen what those two could do with a lock pick.

She may not be able to stop them from leaving, but she sure as hell intended to make sure they were fed first.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

The baked ziti was just about done baking when Jody heard the sound of someone approaching. She was back at the dining room table, a cup of coffee in front of her instead of a shot glass, though it had probably grown tepid as she'd been sitting there staring at it. Her hands tightened around the porcelain, but otherwise she didn't move.

She didn't have to. She knew by the sound of his footsteps who she'd see standing at the end of the table when she finally forced herself to look up. For someone of his size and length of bone, he didn't have a heavy footfall. That wasn't to say that his stride wasn't weighted.

For as long as she'd known him, there had been a weight on Sam Winchester, a burden of the soul she'd often wondered how he carried day in and day out and still managed to be so damn tall.

It was the weight of secrets so dark and terrible they paid lie to every attempt to deny they were there.

They showed in his bowed shoulders, in his lowered brow, and in his sad and distant smiles. They had stared out at her from behind those tired, chameleon eyes, spanning the length of the table and lit by the glow of the laptop monitor in front of him, and even a few stiff belts of black label to toast Bobby's memory hadn't been able to loosen his tongue sufficiently to let them out of their cage.

She'd heard him walk across the floor of that abandoned house with that terrible weight bearing down on him, worry and panic for his missing brother like lead shackles around ankles already hobbled by life. She'd wondered how he'd managed to drag his exhausted, drunk body up the stairs. And how he'd managed to run back down only a few minutes later, eyes so manic-bright even the secrets were momentarily banked.

It really was no wonder Jody had always had a soft spot in her heart for Sam Winchester. How could she not? She had never, in her entire life, met someone as stubbornly resilient as he.

Or, as infuriatingly heartbreaking.

The floorboards creaked as he shifted his feet. She wasn't ready to look at him just yet, to have the last of her... She didn't really know what to call it, but whatever it was, she wasn't ready for it to be dispelled. She didn't need to see him, though, to know he was steeling himself.

"Jody?"

And there was the exact sound she'd been expecting, that subtle little catch in his soft voice that matched the guilt she could feel radiating off him in painful waves.

She felt a faint stinging in her eyes. She pushed herself to her feet and gave him her back while she composed herself.

"Sam Winchester, I swear, if you make me cry, so help me..."

She let the threat dangle, hollow, empty thing that it was. She had a feeling it was inevitable.

There was silence behind her, then a soft huff of breath followed by a softer, "I'm so sorry."

She looked up, catching his reflection in the glass doors of her hutch just as he was looking down at the floor. His fists were stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, and his shoulders were pushed up toward his ears as if he were cold. His face was lost beneath the fall of his hair.

"Don't you dare be sorry for this," she said. The words were a little harsher than she'd intended, but they weren't angry. It wasn't anger she was feeling. It was something else.

"And don't you dare be upset with Dean for bringing you here."

His head shot up at that. Even in the glass, she could see the liquid brightness in his eyes, but he didn't look away. Not even when she squared her shoulders and turned around to face him for real.

She found herself studying his face, mapping the sharper contours of his cheekbones and jaw line, the subtle lines around his eyes and mouth as though she could find some trace of the cherubic little boy he'd been just a few hours before.

She didn't even realize she'd approached him until she was standing right in front of him, staring up into his tear-bright eyes as he looked down at her with an expression so open and raw it was almost painful.

"It's like..." he uttered in a voice better suited for a confessional, soft, reverent. "I suddenly have all these memories that were never there before, you know? And they feel like they've always been there. Memories of...of having a mo—"

His voice broke on the word. Color rose in his face, just a flash of pink across the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones, but it fled just as quickly. So quickly, she reached out and grabbed his arms for fear he was about to faint. The muscles tensed beneath her hands, but he didn't pull away.

He blinked and a single tear dislodged and traced down the side of his face. A second chased it down the other side.

"I feel like I've been given something I've wanted my whole life, but... I had to hurt you to get it."

The small laugh that escaped him was tinged with bitter irony, and something even darker. She could almost hear the words churning in his head: of course, what he wanted would come at her expense; it was the story of his life.

"Dammit. What did I just say about making me cry, young man?" she scolded.

He smiled, even as more tears fell. And there, in the two deep dimples that formed in his cheeks, was the glimpse of _Sammy_ she'd been looking for.

"Dammit," she said again as she yanked him into her arms. She felt him stiffen, resisting the comfort—and damn him for thinking that he didn't deserve it—but she just held him tighter, cupping her hand behind his head and forcing his head down on to her shoulder.

She felt the resistance leave him and his arms slowly encircled her. It couldn't have been very comfortable for him, bent so far over. It wasn't that great for her either, practically standing on her tiptoes to lessen the difference in their heights. Yet, she still pulled him closer.

"You didn't hurt me, sweetie," she told him, whispering the words into his hair.

She'd earned the right to call him that. She didn't even feel the least bit guilty about the small sob the word seemed to tear out of him. It was just the one choked sound before he reined it back in and fell silent. A shudder ran through him and she wondered, fleetingly, if he was crying silently.

But then his arms tightened until he was hugging her in earnest, and he whispered, "I'm so sorry," repeatedly despite her assurances that none of this was his fault. She suddenly wasn't so certain that she wasn't the one who was crying silently.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"Smells great in here," Dean said as he walked into the dining room a little while later.

Jody didn't look up from where she was cutting a tomato to add to the small bowl of lettuce beside her. As salads went, it was pretty sparse, but it was giving her something to do with her hands while the ziti set on the stove. Sam had offered to help, perhaps out of the same need to keep busy, but she'd declined. She'd expected him to retreat to his room, but to her surprise (and relief), he'd slowly drawn out a chair at the table and sat.

"It's just pasta," she replied, "which, I expect you boys to help me eat before you go."

"Go? You kickin' us outta here?" He sounded light, teasing. She could picture the smirk pulling his mouth as he spoke, and knew it was all an act.

"Oh, that wasn't the sound of your duffle bags I just heard hitting the floor before you walked in here?" she shot back as she scooped up the chucks of tomato and dropped them into the bowl. "My mistake."

She gathered the knife and cutting board, and brought them to the sink to wash, casting a quick glance at him as she passed. There was nothing casual about his posture or his expression. It was there all over his face, a damn near perfect mirror image to what she'd seen on Sam's not thirty minutes ago: guilt, concern, and regret.

She thought about ignoring it, pretending it wasn't there at all. Maybe it would be better not to dig at it and make things between them go from temporarily mildly uncomfortable to permanently irreparably awkward. And maybe that was the surest way to make things go south. Well, she wasn't having that. Not after all that had happened in the last few days. It was _not_ going to be for nothing.

She quickly washed the knife and cutting board and set them in the dish drain to dry, slamming the board down into the rack with a little more force than was truly necessary. She dried her hands on the dishtowel and tossed it on the counter with equal irritation, then turned to face him.

"Okay, here's what's gonna happen," she said sternly.

Dean took a step back in surprise, looking at Sam as though he thought to find succor from that quarter. Sam looked just as leery, both hands splayed on either side of the book he'd been leafing through—one off the pile of Bobby's 'stinky' books Dean had left on the table—like he wasn't sure if he should stay where he was or get the hell out of there fast. Dean looked like he was considering the same options.

Well, she wasn't Sheriff for nothing. "First, get these disgusting books off the table so we can eat without the threat of dysentery. Second, wash your hands for the same damn reason. Third, get your asses back here A-sap. Dinner's ready and I wasn't joking when I said you're helping me eat it."

Sam and Dean just blinked at her as if she'd suddenly started spouting one of the languages from the books in front of them. When neither of them made to move, she clapped her hands together loudly. "Chop! Chop!"

Dean bristled, but Sam actually smirked, dimples and all. "Yes, Ma'am," he answered and pushed himself to his feet.

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

"So, Michales was able to recreate the sigil on her end," Dean continued around a mouthful of pasta, recounting his latest conversation with the ME that had occurred shortly before he'd returned to the table, "and she just pushed his gurney right through it."

"And that worked?" Jody asked.

Dean nodded. "Guess so. I mean, Danielson was in pretty rough shape, so he's still unconscious. But his fever has been dropping, so…so far, she's hopeful. Course, he's gonna have a hard time explaining to everyone why he looks like a teenager again."

Sam and Dean had returned to the table, washed up as instructed, but still looking a tad uncomfortable. Tentative. Like they'd thought they needed to treat her with kid gloves. She'd put a quick stop to that with only a look. For the first few minutes, the silence had been broken only by the sound of utensils scraping plates. It was weighted and awkward, but probably unavoidable under the circumstances. Sam had pushed his food across his plate more than he actually ate, but Jody couldn't fault him for it. She hadn't felt much like eating, either, questioning the decision to make pasta while she tried to push noodles past the lump in her throat.

Dean had lit into it as he had every other meal. After a few bites, interrupted only to tap his fork against the side of Sam's plate as a reminder to keep eating, he'd brought up the phone call with the ME. Things had seemed to shift back into place almost immediately.

"The spell wasn't just _symbolically_ stealing years," Sam said. "It was actually stealing them. Unfortunately, simply reversing the spell didn't return them. Maybe, if…"

Jody knew Sam was blaming himself for getting caught in the spell and forcing Dean to abandon the hunt to get him to safety, and Dean was blaming himself for not finding and stopping the witch sooner. They were both full of shit, but nothing she could say was going to change either one of their minds.

"And if wishes were horses…" she remarked instead.

"Beggers would ride," he finished with a small half-smirk. "I know."

Dean just rolled his eyes. "If, nothing," he said. "Neither one of us saw that sigil on the floor. And it could'a just as easily zapped me."

Sam shook his head. "Not likely. He had a type, remember?"

"Yeah, well, maybe if you ate a friggin' Ring Ding, once in a while."

Sam scoffed. "Yah, and maybe if you ate a vegetable once in a while."

"I eat vegetables."

"Ketchup, salsa, and Funyuns don't count."

Dean stabbed a noodle and stuffed it in his mouth, staring at Sam with an antagonistic smirk on his face as he chewed. Sam made a great show of ignoring him as he speared a piece of lettuce and put it in his mouth. Jody just rolled her eyes at the both of them. As long as they didn't start kicking each other under the table or showing each other their half-chewed food, she was content to let them bicker.

She kind of enjoyed it, actually. It seemed to shake loose the last little bit of tightness around their eyes, and eased the tenseness from their shoulders. She noticed how Dean seemed to sink more into a casual slouch the more relaxed he became, while Sam seemed to sit up a bit more straight as some of that weight lifted.

She also noticed how Sam ate most of his meal without seeming to realize he was doing it. Dean gave her a discrete wink as if to say it had been his plan all along.

When they were finished eating, Jody cleared the dishes, waving away their offer to help. "I'd offer you boys a drink," she remarked as she returned with three mugs of coffee, "but seeing as how you'll be leaving soon…"

She couldn't help the way her voice lifted at the tail end, making it almost a question even though she knew the answer already.

Sam looked down, his hair hiding his eyes from view. She often wondered if he kept it long for that very purpose, to hide his too-expressive eyes before they could give him away. Dean, she knew, had his own way of hiding what he was feeling.

"So, y' _are_ kickin' us out," he teased, though it sounded a little flat.

Jody smiled at the attempt. After all, she was wired much the same way. "You're welcome to stay to do the dishes. Then, the bathroom needs new grout. And let's see…"

Dean clapped his hands together once and started to push himself to his feet. "Whoa, would ya look at the time."

Beside him, Sam just gave them a wan smile.

"Drink your coffee." Jody slid a mug to each of them, then returned the kitchen for cream and sugar.

"Seriously, though," Dean called after her. "As much as Sam, here, looks like he needs his beauty sleep…"

"Shut up," she heard Sam grumble. As she was returning to the table, though, she saw Sam give his brother a good-natured shove in the arm—no doubt in retaliation for the shove Dean had given him while Jody's back was turned— his dimples deepening.

Dean smiled, looking rather proud of himself. "Danielson may be outta the woods," he continued, sobering as the subject warranted, "but Michales' team still hasn't found the sigil. I don't like leaving things that might come back and bite us in the ass."

Jody nodded. She understood the need to see a case finished down to the last report. It was always those loose ends that tripped you up unexpectedly and usually when your hands were too damn full to grab onto something before you fell. Still, she couldn't help but worry about them heading back to the scene.

"I know," she said instead. "I'll sleep a lot better knowing that thing is out of service."

"We all will," Sam agreed.

"I'd feel a helluva lot better if I'd been able to get his damn book," Dean said, a note of frustration in his voice.

Sam frowned. "Dean, you know as well as I do, there was no way that witch was going to hand that over to you, any more than he'd have agreed to reverse that spell, not if he was like any of the others we've run across. He'd have just whammied you, too, and then disappeared. Then where would we be?"

Unsaid was, _Where would I be?_ From the look on his face, Dean had heard him just fine. He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the absolution, or maybe embarrassed by it. The two of them were terrible at accepting pats on the backs for a job well done, she'd noticed, even from each other.

"Yeah, well… Wherever he hid it," he replied, "the sonuvabitch won't be usin' it no more."

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_

It was just a few minutes past seven o'clock when Sam and Dean put on their coats and shouldered their duffle bags, prepared to leave. They both looked tired. It had been a long week for all of them, especially Dean, though now that they were standing at the door, he seemed to be finding a second wind. Sam still looked a little pale, though he insisted he felt fine. Whatever ailment had been affecting Sammy, it seemed to have gone away when he did.

Jody was trying very hard not to think of it in those terms: Sammy having _gone away_ , but every once and a while it would slip by her defenses. She was probably going to have to get used to that happening for a while. Right now, she just wanted to get through them walking out that door, getting into their car, and driving away without her falling apart.

"We can take these with us," Sam said, hoisting up the duffle bag that contained all of Sammy's toys and necessities. "Unless, you know anyone around here who might need them."

She shook her head. She didn't trust herself not to tell him to leave them with her. It was bad enough she'd kept the little stuffed tiger, though she still wasn't sure why.

"I saw a drop box on my way into town," Dean offered. "We'll hit it on the way out."

She'd already packed up the winter clothes Sammy had used, and she handed that bag over to Dean, too. "You can put this with it," she said. He looked into the bag then up at his brother, and a small smile tugged one corner of his mouth. She couldn't bring herself to look at Sam just yet.

"No problem," he said, setting the bag on the floor beside him.

Then, because she wasn't sure he would do it if she didn't initiate it, she spread her arms out in front of him. "Okay, get over here," she said, beckoning him forward.

She really didn't wait for him to respond before she pulled him into a hug. He didn't hesitate, just hugged her back. "Thank you," he said softly. "I don't know what I would'a…" His arms tightened around her.

"Anytime," she replied. "And I mean that." They broke apart, but she continued to hold his arms, holding him away from her enough that she could look him in the eye. "You hear me, young man? _Any_ time."

"Yes Ma'am," he answered with a smile that was devilishly charming and sincere all at the same time.

"You call me when this is over," she said, waving her finger in front of his face. "Don't leave me hanging. I _will_ come down there…"

"I hear ya, Sheriff. _Jody_."

She yanked him into another quick hug then let him go. He gave her a smile and a wink, then turned toward the door.

"Oh," she called him back, turning to grab the small, clear plastic container off the coffee table. "For the road."

His face lit up when he saw what was in it. "Cookies? Sweet!" He gave her a kiss on the cheek, all bad boy charm, smiling ear to ear. He turned back to the door, slapping his hand against Sam's stomach as he reached for the doorknob.

"I'll be in the car," he told him. He pulled open the door and stepped out into the cold, and wasn't two steps down the walk before he'd pried the lid off the container. "Shake a leg, Sammy!" he called over his shoulder, brandishing a cookie over his head as he went.

"Those will be gone before we hit the interstate," Sam remarked with a shake of his head.

Jody looked up at him, catching the fond, indulgent smile on Sam's face as he watched his brother walk away. It was a nice look on him, one she didn't get too see all that often. All too soon, though, that smile faded. He dropped his gaze to the floor then lifted it again, turning his head to look at her.

"Thank you," he said softly. "Not just for… for taking care of me, you know, but… for being there for Dean. Since Bobby, well…" He sealed his lips hard on whatever he'd started to say, and Jody was glad. She didn't think she could hold against that subject, too.

"Hey," she said, keeping her tone light, casual. "I've been trying to tell you boys for a while now: you can call me whenever you need _anything_. And I don't mean just when your asses are in a sling, either."

He gave her a small smile at that. "I'm sure Dean will want more cookies."

"Well, we'll make him help make them next time."

"You might have a bigger mess to clean up."

Just like that, the thin veil of humor they'd been holding up between them fell away. Jody's chest felt hollow, her throat tight. "You really do remember it all, don't you?"

He looked out the front door at his brother, or maybe just at the snow outside, recalling other memories of snow angels and pushing snow off her steps with a dustpan shovel. "Yeah." The hint of a dimple appeared in his closest cheek. "And they're good memories..."

She'd been resisting up to then, keeping a little distance for both their sakes. But there'd been such a note of apology in his voice, and she just couldn't let that stand. She reached out and laid her hand on his arm, giving the tight muscle a squeeze. "For me, too," she told him.

It didn't even come as a surprise to her that she meant it. For all the pain she was feeling, would probably be feeling for quite a while to come, she didn't regret any of it. Not even a little. And she sure as hell didn't want him to regret any of it either.

He sucked in a tight breath, blinking rapidly, and uttered, "I'm glad." His eyes were bright when he met her gaze, so much emotion lurking right below the surface, but he smiled.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked him. "You know, Dean said you were unconscious for hours when you were turned."

He nodded. "No, I'm—I'm good. I think it was a little harder on the three-year-old body." He shifted his feet uncomfortably. "Are…are you gonna be okay?"

She gave him a smile. "Ah, sweetie, you know me." She waved off the concern, though she could feel her eyes starting to sting a little.

Color rose in his face and he dipped his head in embarrassment. "You're gonna keep calling me that, now, aren't you?"

"Damn straight, I am."

And, with that, she pulled him into a hug—another privilege she'd earned and she intended to take full advantage of it. He didn't seem to mind. His long arms went around her back, and he squeezed her every bit as hard as she was squeezing him. Maybe a little harder. Taking a breath was a chore, but she managed it enough to say, "You give a pretty amazing hug, yourself."

Sam made a small, choked sound, and he hugged her a little harder. When they finally broke apart, his eyes were red-rimmed and wet. "God, Dean's gonna give me shit for miles," he said as he swiped a hand across his face. But he was smiling.

Jody wasn't much better. She could feel tears running down her face, and she knew there'd be more before the night was through. If he noticed, Sam didn't say anything, and she was very grateful for that. He reached down and retrieved the bag of snow wear that Dean, in his excitement over the container of chocolate chip cookies, had left by the door, then shifted his duffle bag higher onto his shoulder.

"Thank you," he said again, then pushed open the storm door and headed down the steps.

Jody watched as he tossed his bags in the back seat of the Impala then folded his long body into the front seat next to his brother. They exchanged a few words, Dean seeming to be doing most of the talking while Sam merely nodded or shook his head in response. Dean reached across the back of the seat and cupped the back of Sam's neck, giving him a little shake, then he put the car in gear and pulled out of the driveway.

As she and Sammy had done those few, short days ago—days that felt like forever ago—Jody stood in the open doorway and watched until the Impala reached the end of her street and turned onto the road that would take them out of town.

 **The End**

 _~~~~~SPN~~~~~SPN~~~~~_


End file.
